Quality Models for Automated Evaluation of Web sites Usability and Accessibility

When usability evaluation is performed on web sites, many different evaluation methods can be used that are analytical or empirical, depending if they are conducted with or without end users, on a real web site (part or whole) or on a representation of it. A classification on evaluation methods is given on these parameters so as to assess the relevance and appropriateness of each evaluation method. For this purpose, the quality models for web usability evaluation need to be characterized. When a method is applied (semi-) automatically on a web site, the characterization of these quality models become even more preeminent and crucial to really know the relevance and appropriateness of the results provided by the automated method. Towards this end, different quality models are compared based on guideline review to show their various levels of precision, their advantages and shortcomings.