Web Accessibility Observatory Tracker

The OAW Tracker is the tool that allows the Government of Spain to carry out the different iterations of the Web Accessibility Observatory (OAW) and the usage of the online diagnostic service available in the Accessibility Community . The OAW Tracker allows the accessibility verification of a website and generates the automatic reports taking into account almost 100 check-points implemented in the platform, and also provides recommendations on how to solve the detected problems.

The accessibility review of the OAW is carried out using an automatic methodology based on the UNE 139803:2012 (WCAG 2.0) standard , developed ad-hoc for the Web Accessibility Observatory. This methodology takes into account 20 accessibility verifications. Each verification is composed by many checks (more than 100 in total) that are executed automatically. Some of these checks are usually manual review, but they have been included through specialized metrics.

The methodology is currently being modified to adapt it to WCAG 2.1 and to the provisions of the Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1524, of 11 October 2018, establishing a monitoring methodology and the arrangements for reporting by Member States in accordance with Directive (EU) 2016/2102 .

The OAW Tracker allows the configuration of all the necessary parameters to carry out an observatory iteration (list of web portals, web pages by portal, methodology, frequency, etc) and also allows to perform and review all the execution process. In addition, it allows the generation of the conclusions reports and the necessary results, to obtain the accessibility overview in a sector and also to obtain the detailed reports for each web portal that contains all existing problems.

In addition, the OAW Tracker is used by the online diagnosis service available in the Accessibility Community in order to obtain an estimation, under demand, of which will be the results in an official iteration, ease the future correction and comparison of the possible errors present in the web portal.

The OAW Tracker analyzes more than 700 web portals twice in a year, which means roughly the analysis of 25.000 web pages in a year. Also, through the online diagnosis service it’s requested the analysis of more than 60.000 web pages per year.

From the technological point of view, this product has been built using free software tools and its provision is possible thanks to free software tools like apache, tomcat, mysql, etc.

The Governments of Argentina and of Costa Rica are already reusing the software for the monitoring of their national accessibility policies.

This tool could be used by other States or Institutions to perform periodically accessibility reviews for a lot of web portals, aligned with the requirements of the Directive (EU) 2016/2102 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 October 2016 on the accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies .

More information in English about the Web Accessibility Observatory and the OAW Tracker , in the "Web Accesibility Observatory (information in English)" section.