AChecker Road Map

The following are some the AChecker development activities underway or in planning. If you are a member of the ATutor community, and would like to suggest new AChecker features, suggest them in the community forums.

• Short Term (early 2011)

  • CSS Validator

    The CSS Validator implemented by the University of Bologna (Unibo) as part of their GSoC project with IDRC (ATRC) will be tested, refined, and merged into the AChecker public source code.

  • Colour Contrast Evaluator

    The colour contrast evaluator also implemented as part of the Unibo GSoC project will also be tested, refined, and merged into the AChecker public source code.

  • AChecker Patcher

    Like ATutor and AContent, the Patcher allows users to apply security patches, bug fixes, add new accessibility checks, and add new features and feature adjustments in between AChecker releases. The patcher is already complete, and will be released along with the new CSS an colour tools produced by Unibo. A patch publisher module will be added to the admin tools on atutor.ca, and an area of update.atutor.ca will be setup to serve patches for AChecker.

  • AChecker Upgrade Utility

    The next release being the first upgrade release, an upgrade utility will be added to the AChecker installer. The ATutor upgrade utility can be adapted for this purpose.

  • Paste HTML for Evaluation

    There have been many requests from the community for a feature that allows HTML to be pasted into AChecker for review. It will be a relality in the coming release. This feature will also make it possible for those using the public AChecker to evaluate HTML pages on an Intranet, or on a personal computer not accessible from the Web.

• Late 2011

  • Accessibility Check Refinements

    The University of Bologna has undertaken to update the current accessibility checks in AChecker, refining those that were adapted from AChecker's predecessor the ATRC Accessibility Checker. They're also adding a variety of new checks to the system.

  Accessibility Report Restructuring

  Accessibility reports will be grouped by guideline, then grouped by check associated with each guideline. This will replace the current report which orders items as they are generated based on the sequence in which HTML elements appear in a Web page. Groupings will allow evaluators to quickly scan through repetively checks, such as whether link text in meaningful oe Alt text acturately describes an image, and make batch decisions for likely and potential problems, greatly reducing the effort required to complete an accessibility review.

  • Accessibility Evaluation Optimization

    Evaluations on sites that have very long HTML pages, can take a very long time, and use up a great deal of processing power. Often errors are found repeatedly, and presented repeatedly in the accessibility report generated by AChecker, making for very long reports. AChecker will be optimized to make better use of computing resources, and reports will be optimized to group repetitive items by accessibility guideline.

• Longer Term

  • AccessForAll Accessibility Evaluations

    For the upcoming EU project that will fund the development of a tool to evaluate conformance with AccessForAll(AFA), a utility will be added to AChecker to assess the AFA conformance of Web content.

  • AChecker Site Spider

    Currently AChecker evaluates one page at a time. There have been many requests to provide site reports. To accommodate this a site spider will be created that traverses a site to a particular level, or through a particular area, to produce a site report. See Vamola Integration.

  • Vamola Integration

    The University of Bologna has created an Apache module called Vamola, which uses AChecker as a service to nightly evaluate a collection of Web sites. It, along with the spider described above, will be setup to provide broader accessibility monitoring services through IDI.