News, Links and Commentary
Sunday, August 17, 2003
Web Accessibility Tools
E-Access Bulletin is a great source of information about technology for people who have a vision impairment. The latest issue includes a link to AccessifyForum.com, a new discussion forum for people interested in accessibility. Both web accessibility and access to the physical environment can be discussed and some useful threads have already started since the site opened on August 8.
From a thread discussing automatic accessibility checkers, I learnt about Cynthia Says, a tool developed by HiSoftware and the Internet Society Disability and Special Needs Chapter. The Cynthia Says report gives a table listing checkpoints (either the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) in the left hand column and then three columns indicating if you have passed (yes, no or other). It may have been more useful to separate automatic checks from those checkpoints that needed personal attention (or user checks, as Bobby calls them). While I didn't find this tool to be as useful as Bobby (possibly because I am more familiar with Bobby), I did discover that I've accidentally retained some deprecated HTML on my main RD and RP in Australia page. Once again I learn the value of using a variety of tools - or perhaps I should check all of my pages manually very soon.
The same thread lead me to finally check out the WAVE 3.0 Accessibility Tool from WebAIM. The WAVE report displays icons over a display of the tested Web page. The icons indicate accessibility problems as well as accessibility and structural/semantic features. At first I used the Opera browser to read the report and, because Opera doesn't show alternative text in tool tips, my first impression was that the report would be a hassle to work through. Fortunately, a legend is available on a separate page. Although the report display is surprisingly clean, despite the icons, looking at it with tunnel vision meant that I was scanning the report and hoping not to miss any icons.
I've blogged on about the accessibility tools before and was interested to read 'Notes on some tools for checking and improving Web page accessibility (Bobby and A-Prompt)' by Jukka "Yucca" Korpela. I'll hopefully seek out more useful comparisons and critiques of these types of tools in the future. The easier they are to use, the more likely people are to use them and to build accessible Web sites.
From a thread discussing automatic accessibility checkers, I learnt about Cynthia Says, a tool developed by HiSoftware and the Internet Society Disability and Special Needs Chapter. The Cynthia Says report gives a table listing checkpoints (either the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) in the left hand column and then three columns indicating if you have passed (yes, no or other). It may have been more useful to separate automatic checks from those checkpoints that needed personal attention (or user checks, as Bobby calls them). While I didn't find this tool to be as useful as Bobby (possibly because I am more familiar with Bobby), I did discover that I've accidentally retained some deprecated HTML on my main RD and RP in Australia page. Once again I learn the value of using a variety of tools - or perhaps I should check all of my pages manually very soon.
The same thread lead me to finally check out the WAVE 3.0 Accessibility Tool from WebAIM. The WAVE report displays icons over a display of the tested Web page. The icons indicate accessibility problems as well as accessibility and structural/semantic features. At first I used the Opera browser to read the report and, because Opera doesn't show alternative text in tool tips, my first impression was that the report would be a hassle to work through. Fortunately, a legend is available on a separate page. Although the report display is surprisingly clean, despite the icons, looking at it with tunnel vision meant that I was scanning the report and hoping not to miss any icons.
I've blogged on about the accessibility tools before and was interested to read 'Notes on some tools for checking and improving Web page accessibility (Bobby and A-Prompt)' by Jukka "Yucca" Korpela. I'll hopefully seek out more useful comparisons and critiques of these types of tools in the future. The easier they are to use, the more likely people are to use them and to build accessible Web sites.
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