A11YRepair: Bridging Web Accessibility Barriers via Knowledge-Enhanced Divide-and-Conquer Repair

Abstract

Web accessibility (A11Y), which ensures web content is perceivable and usable for users with disabilities, is a critical requirement for modern web applications. Yet existing tooling overwhelmingly focuses on detecting A11Y violations rather than repairing them. Automated program repair (APR) techniques appear promising for this setting, but our study shows that state-of-the-art APR systems perform poorly when applied to real-world A11Y violations. Unlike conventional sparse-bug scenarios, web A11Y issues often manifest as multiple structurally related violations per page, requiring coordinated edits across multiple files. Existing repair systems fail to manage this multi-fault scale, as they handle each bug individually without considering their relationships or incorporating domain rules such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We propose A11YRepair, an LLM-based framework for web A11Y repair. A11YRepair introduces a divide-and-conquer workflow that first clusters violations requiring coordinated edits to reduce redundant localization, and then decomposes each cluster by root cause so the LLM can generate focused and consistent patches. The framework further incorporates WCAG-driven knowledge to strengthen domain awareness during both fault localization and patch synthesis. To support systematic evaluation, we construct A11YBench, a benchmark of 60 real-world web projects collected from GitHub. Experimental results show that A11YRepair achieves higher repair effectiveness and lower cost than state-of-the-art baselines, and ablation studies confirm the importance of its divide-and-conquer design and selective domain knowledge integration. Specifically, patches generated by A11YRepair have been merged into open-source projects from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, K8s, Docker, and Alibaba, demonstrating its practical value.