Facilitating Development of Accessible Web Applications

Today, more than 60% of websites on the Internet are created and run using content management systems (CMS), and this rate is constantly increasing. Thus, it has become important to ensure that these platforms support and promote web accessibility for all. While in traditional software engineering approaches, the accessibility validation is carried out at the end of the process, often with the support of external validators, it would be important to support Web developers during the actual development process while the content is defined. The work described in this paper addresses the possibility of supporting web accessibility while developing websites with WordPress, the currently most used CMS. For this purpose, we report on the design and development of a plugin to evaluate the accessibility of pages created with this popular platform. The developed plugin aims to provide WordPress users with open, useful and effective accessibility evaluation support capable of filling the gaps in current practices.