I hereby present to you a rapid review on accessibility in development of websites, with the title: Automated Testing for Website Accessibility.
Now, a rapid review could be said to be a method for providing a "quick glance" (overview) at a particular requested topic. By finding evidence in the sources (primary sources perhaps), the goal is to create a type of review, more slim than a full literary review, using perhaps only a single or a few selected databases.
If you are more interested in the rapid review approach in the field of computer science and software engineering, see the reference to Cartaxo in the end of this blog post, which I was provided with in the course I took about scientific method and where I wrote this rapid review.
This was my first try at the approach, and also first time to use a thematic analysis (which I will write more on eventually, and have already written a few initials thoughts on, which I intend to elaborate further on).
So with that disclaimer in place, I now present my completed rapid review, which I hope might be useful for practitioners and interesting to researchers.
As I recently wrote in my bachelor's thesis proposal, the aim of this rapid review was to give a useful overview of the current (as of 2025) of what tools are being used in accessibility website development and testing, and by applying a more quantitative approach (frequency analysis), yet of a limited sample size: give some indications on what tools are being used, primarily in accessibility research, and their 'popularity'.
This was explored in RQ2: What types of automatic accessibility testing tools are there? where the following figures can be found.
Fig. 2. The ten most frequently used tools in the studies. See appendix for a figure of all studies.
A similar analysis was carried out on the WCAG versions being used in these primary sources (studies), which again, in this limited sample size, indicated that there might be a "lag" in the adoption of the latest WCAG version. The following figure was included in RQ1.
Research question 1 (RQ1) was summarized as: What is possible to test and how effective is automated testing? Besides my analysis of WCAG versions, I looked into various measurements such as coverage, completeness and correctness.
Besides from these more quantitative measures that were discovered in the studies, concepts like test-ability and effectiveness were also explored.
As in: What is possible to test? And, how effective are these automatic WCAG based testing tools?
Finally, best practices was also examined in research question 3 (RQ3): What are common best practices of using automatic testing tools?
Where some of the key takeaways was: do not solely rely on automated testing (source). And combine tools.
Again, repeating the disclaimer: as this is a limited study the conclusions and the results may be limited as well. And this is merely a bachelor level study, yet I thought it might be an interesting source for both practitioners and researchers.
In either case, I learned a lot myself and will hopefully write my bachelor's thesis in a related area. But as for now, I enjoyed the methodology and implementing it in the work so to speak; as well as working with the analysis.
You can find a link to the rapid review here.
If you wish to cite this rapid review, I'm unsure if it's possible, since it's not peer-reviewed nor published on any official university source. It is only my own personal publication, so to speak. Therefore, something like:
Larsson, Nils, Rapid Review: Automated Testing for Website Accessbility, 2025, written in the course Computer Science C: Scientific Method at Mid Sweden University, published on the compartdev blog at September 20, 2025.
Other related references
You can also watch the video on performing a thematic analysis using PDF sources and open source software on this link, which I used when I wrote this rapid review: here.
B. Cartaxo, G. Pinto, and S. Soares, “Rapid Reviews in Software Engineering,” Mar. 22,
2020, arXiv: arXiv:2003.10006. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2003.10006.
