Exploring the Use of AI for Enhanced Accessibility Testing of Web Solutions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds significant potential for enhancing accessibility and user experience across digital products and services. However, mainstream web solutions commonly used by the general population still face accessibility barriers, hindering equal participation in the information society for people with disabilities. This article explores several promising applications of AI that can be used to create accessible solutions for people with disabilities. We also present our research, which aims to explore and demonstrate how various AI-based techniques can enhance and streamline accessibility testing for web solutions. We selected four success criteria from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that currently require extensive manual work and developed four prototypes using open-source machine-learning models to enhance conformance testing. While the prototypes need further optimization and evaluation, the results suggest that AI-based techniques can significantly reduce the need for manual work in accessibility testing.