The WADcher Public APIs are defined and freely available at the WADcher APIs Home Page. The WADcher APIs are an open set of HTTP REST and asynchronous messaging interfaces (including models and interfaces) that enable any Accessibility Evaluation Tool to use the WADcher platform.
The WADcher APIs are Accessibility Tool agnostic by using a common semantic vocabulary required for accessibility standards/recommendations, consisting of selected Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) with Assertions addressing:
- Assertor – who or what ran the test
- Test Subject – what is being tested: web content (web pages, videos, applets, etc.), software, etc.
- Test Criterion – what are we evaluating the test subject against: a specification, a set of guidelines, etc.
- Test Result – what was the outcome of the test
The WADcher APIs consist of the following APIs:
- Rulesets API. This API is used by the WADcher platform to communicate with an external web accessibility testing tool to find out which ruleset or set of rulesets are supported by the tool.
- Assertion API. This API is used by the WADcher platform to insert/update assertions in the results of an audit performed by a web accessibility testing tool.
- Assertions API. This API is used by the WADcher platform to communicate with an external web accessibility testing tool to stream the assertions of an audit result.
- Audit API. This API is used by the WADcher platform to communicate with an external web accessibility testing tool to start an audit.
- AuditResults API. This API is used by the WADcher platform to communicate with an external web accessibility testing tool to stream the results of an audit.
- Test Subject (source) API. This API is used by the WADcher platform (in particular, the DSE) to extract the HTML rendered source code out of a tested resource (test subject) in an audit.