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Re: testing web apps for accessibility

for

From: Sam Foster
Date: Mar 21, 2006 10:50PM

Mark Magennis wrote:

>Sam,
>
>Looks like you have an interesting, challenging but very worthwhile job
>there. Rejoice! We are so fortunate to have jobs like these.
>
>I have a fair few ideas about tools and approaches to accessibility
>evaluation. You may already be aware of many of these issues, but just
>in case I'll dump most of my thoughts on you, so apologies if you
>already know a lot of this.
>
>
>
thank you, this was all really useful. So, given we are not testing for
success, I think an audit better describes what I'm trying to do here:
get some insight into what problems exists, the scale of the problem,
and produce next steps - which might include user testing. I think what
I might do is ask the customer care folks to see if there are any real
scenarios that they've logged which I can use to guide this.

>If you
>try to user test an application with lots of technical barriers, you can
>waste your time getting stuck in problem after problem that you already
>know about and not end up learning much.
>
that's exactly where I'm at now, and what I'm trying to work around.
Maybe if I reduce the scope drastically, and just address a handful of
representative screens from a sample workflow I can get a more rounded
report that takes the section 508 and WCAG guidelines and provides some
detail on where it fails, and how it could be remedied.

>A lot of auditors now use
>either the AIS accessibility toolbar for Internet Explorer which you can
>download free from www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/index.html
>or the Web developer extension for Firefox which you can download free
>from www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/.
>
I've used both for some time, but hadn't considered really using them
here because of the manual (and subjective) process it implies. But I
think your point is that this is a necessarily manual and subjective
process, with quality of results being more important that quantity.
Thank you again for such a thoughtful post,

Sam Foster