Accessibility Evaluation of Arabic E-Commerce Web Sites Using Automated Tools

Disabled people encounter many barriers while attempting to access the services on the web. Nevertheless, many tools, which could help them to access the web, are available. E-commerce websites have been also intensively and widely used. The e-commerce market in Saudi Arabia will hit $13.3 billion by 2015. This huge investment requires e-commerce websites to be accessible by different types of users. This paper explores the tools that usually used by disabled users while using the web. It also discusses a number of available tools that help designers, developers and testers to assess web accessibility. It also evaluates the accessibility of 3 popular Arab ecommerce websites using 5 accessibility testing tools; namely Achecker, TAW, Eval Access, MAUVE and FAE. This research has found that Most accessibility guidelines are covered by Achecker tool. Navigation, readability, input assistance and timing are the common found accessibility problems while assessing the accessibility of the targeted websites. It has been also revealed that HTML can influence accessibility evaluation as HTML errors are considered as accessibility problems. It has been clearly observed that improvements are needed for better web accessibility, although some tools did report a small number of accessibility problems for some websites.