Several works of literature contributed to the web evaluation process in recent years to promote digital inclusion by addressing several accessibility guidelines, methods, processes, and techniques. Researchers have investigated how the web evaluation process could be facilitated by including accessibility issues to obtain an inclusive and accessible solution to improve the user experience and increase user satisfaction. Three systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have been conducted in the context of past research, considering such research focuses. This paper presents a new SLR approach concerning accessibility in the web evaluation process, considering the period from 2010 to 2021. The review of 92 primary studies showed the contribution of publications on different phases of the web evaluation process mainly by highlighting the significant studies in the framework design and testing process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study focused on the web accessibility literature reporting the engineering assets for evaluation of new accessible and inclusive web-based solutions (e.g., websites). Besides, in this study, we aim to provide a new direction to the web designers and developers with an updated view of process, methods, techniques, tools, and other crucial aspects to contribute to the accessible process enrichment, as well as depict the gaps and challenges that may be worthy to be investigated in the future. The findings of this SLR introduce a new dimension in web accessibility research on determining and mitigating the research gap of web accessibility issues for web designers, developers, and other practitioners.

Road traffic injuries are one of the primary reasons for death, especially in developing countries like Bangladesh. Safety in land transport is one of the major concerns for road safety authorities and other policymakers. For this reason, contributory factors identification associated with crashes is necessary for reducing road crashes and ensuring transportation safety. This paper presents an analytical approach to identifying significant contributing factors of Bangladesh road crashes by evaluating the road crash data, considering three different severity levels (non-fetal, severe, and extremely severe). Generally, official crash databases are compiled from police-reported crash records. Though the official datasets are focusing on compiling a wide array of attributes, an assorted number of unreported issues can be observed that demands an alternative source of crash data. Therefore, this proposed approach considers compiling crash data from newspapers in Bangladesh which could be complimentary to the official crash database. To conduct the analysis, first, we filtered the useful features from compiled crash data using three popular feature selection techniques: chi-square, Two-way ANOVA, and Regression analysis. Then, we employed three machine learning classifiers: Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Naïve Bayes over the extracted features. A confusion matrix was considered to evaluate the proposed model, including classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The predictive machine learning model, namely, Random Forest using Label Encoder with chi-square and Two-way ANOVA feature selection process, seems the best option for crash severity prediction that provides high prediction accuracy. The resulting model highlights nine out of fourteen independent features as responsible factors. Significant features associated with crash severities include driver characteristics (gender, license type, seat belts), vehicle characteristics (vehicle type), road characteristics (road surface type, road classification), environmental conditions (day of crash occurred, time of crash), and injury localization. This outcome may contribute to improving traffic safety of Bangladesh.

Since 1996, web accessibility evaluation has been an important aspect of web development to increase social inclusion for people with special needs. Several web accessibility evaluation and testing tools have been developed to automatically evaluate websites in order to identify barriers for people with disabilities. The developed tools are significant since their aim is to effectively represent accessibility issues. However, a few issues with website accessibility cannot be identified through the existing accessibility testing tools due to several limitations, including (i) inappropriate guideline selection, (ii) ambiguities in guideline understanding, (iii) avoiding user and expert suggestions as evaluation criteria, (iv) limited consideration of semantic perspectives, and (iv) unwillingness to incorporate the updated engineering methods. Therefore, reported results may be unclear and inappropriate for some users. Such limitations are critical factors that reduce the effectiveness of the developed tools. These issues cause unwillingness to use a particular tool or possible adoption of other tools. In this situation, we must identify which aspects are important to incorporate in the development in order to make the developed solution more effective as it allows users to make their website accessible to people with disabilities. In this paper, first, we present a literature review of different existing solutions for web accessibility testing to identify their challenges and limitations. Following the reported findings, we propose an automated web accessibility evaluation framework addressing several accessibility aspects to improve the evaluation results by mitigating the limitations of existing solutions. The proposed framework is validated by comparing it with existing automated solutions considering their functional properties. The proposed accessibility framework might be beneficial for web developers, accessibility engineers, and other practitioners to incorporate into their development and research.

Websites content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) ensure that websites should be perceivable, understandable, navigable, and interactive. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the importance of accessible websites and online content grew throughout the world. Therefore, in this study, we examined COVID-19-related official government websites. This research covered 21 government websites, with 13 websites from European countries and 8 websites from Asian countries, to evaluate their accessibility following WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 guidelines. The overall goal of this study was to identify the frequent accessibility problems that might help the website owners to identify the shortcomings of their websites. The target websites were evaluated in two steps: in step-1, evaluation was performed through four automatic web accessibility testing tools such as Mauve++, Nibbler, WAVE, and WEB accessibility tools; in step-2, evaluation went through human observation, such as system usability testing and expert testing. The automatic evaluation results showed that few of the websites were accessible; a significant number of websites were not accessible for people with disabilities. In addition, system usability testing found some complexity in website organization, short explanations, and outdated information. The expert testing suggested improving the color of the websites, organization of links, buttons, and font size. This study might be helpful for associated authorities to improve the quality of the websites in the future.

In recent years, there has been a growing field of research focused on comprehending complexity in relation to web platform accessibility. It has shown that it is quite difficult to accurately assess and identify web accessibility concerns while taking multifaceted factors into account. It is imperative to prioritize multi-dimensional characteristics as they facilitate the integration of many aspects into the assessment process, which is a critical component in enhancing the accessibility evaluation process. Although many existing solutions with varying degrees of computational success have been proposed by scholars, they are confined to (1) following a certain set of rules of a specific guideline; (2) limited evaluation properties; (3) disregard for user criteria; and (4) complex functional properties or architectural design. To address these problems, we present in this work a straightforward yet precise model that assesses webpage accessibility by taking into account common features of the structural and visual elements of webpages that are part of the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) structure. In order to predict a webpage’s accessibility status, we implemented three distinct algorithms to analyze web features/objects considering both semantic and non-semantic aspects. We performed experimental work to validate 20 university webpages in Hungary through our developed tool. The computed result of the developed tool was assessed by comparing the result with a user study where we performed user testing that included 40 users’ 80 reviews on the same 20 university webpages in Hungary. Additionally, we compared our developed tool with other scientific models (that already exist) and existing ten open-source commercial automated testing tools considering several functional characteristics or properties. This two-phase assessment result shows that the developed tool has several advanced properties and the potential to predict the accessibility issues of the tested webpages.

Information Technology (IT) plays a vital role in promoting sustainability and enabling independent living. People with cognitive disabilities face numerous challenges in their daily lives, such as social interactions, learning new things, and improving specific abilities. A variety of therapies and treatments have been introduced to help address these challenges. Recently, computer-assisted therapeutic procedures, treatment procedures, and assistive systems have emerged as beneficial tools to improve the lives of people with cognitive disabilities. Advances in technology have made it possible to develop effective applications specifically designed for this group of individuals. The objective of this paper is to identify potential applications of these developed solutions for people with cognitive disabilities, evaluate their effectiveness, strengths, and limitations, and understand their contribution in addressing various difficulties due to cognitive impairments. To achieve this goal, we reviewed 23 studies that demonstrate several applications developed for people with cognitive disabilities to address their unique issues. Our investigation indicates that the developed applications hold promise, although a few issues with cost-effectiveness, device transparency, and specific disability dependency may limit their effectiveness. Hence, this paper aims to shed light on these innovative applications, their implications, and their role in aiding users in tackling their specific challenges.