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Re: Bringing accessibility into the development process (request for feedback).

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From: Jon Gunderson
Date: Apr 16, 2007 8:20AM

A tool we are developing at the University of Illinois is trying to go beyond traditional accessibility checking and providing additional evaluation information on the presence of functional accessibility features.

Sign up for a free Functional Web Accessibility Evaluation (FAE) account to test entire websites or without an account you can test one page at a time:

http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu

NOTE: Accounts are needed to keep spam bots out

If your pages use scripting to generate some or all of the rendered content you can use the Firefox Accessibility Extension to send the dynamic generated html to FAE for evaluation.

http://firefox.cita.uiuc.edu

Use the Tools -> FAE Report option in the menu or the Toolbar to generate an FAE report on the dynamic content.

Jon


---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:02:51 +0200
>From: "Peter Krantz" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>Subject: [WebAIM] Bringing accessibility into the development process (request for feedback).
>To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
>Hi!
>
>First: sorry if this comes through like a shameless plug. It is not the
>intention. Secondly: sorry for the long post.
>
>I have been thnking about ways to bring accessibility into the development
>process [1]<http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2007/rapid-accessibility-feedback/>;and
>make it a normal part of development activities. In my experience
>accessibility evaluations are conducted at the end of a project. Testing at
>the end makes it a lot harder to fix errors and they typically cost more to
>fix.
>
>To bring accessibility into a development project I have tried a couple of
>things and discovered some challenges:
>
> - Many developers know little about accessibility implications
> emerging from their coding decisions.
> - Accessibility evaluation is often conducted by experts outside the
> development team.
> - Aspects of accessibility (e.g. visual design, markup, content) is
> not clearly mapped to areas of responsibility in a development team.
>
>To get accessibility into the development process I have focused on
>automated evaluation of markup accessibility issues. The idea is that if you
>can make a basic markup accessibility check part of other automated tests
>there will be alot less errors discovered at the end of the project. Many of
>the existing tools today are not automatable and require a lot of expertise
>to go understand the result.
>
>For this purpose I am trying to make it possible to integrate Raakt (the
>Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit)
>[2]<http://www.peterkrantz.com/raakt/wiki/>;into some of the popular
>acceptance testing frameworks.
>
>I would be grateful for your feedback on my ideas. Could this type of basic
>testing be valuable? In your experience, are my observations valid?
>
>[1]: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2007/rapid-accessibility-feedback/
>[2]: http://www.peterkrantz.com/raakt/wiki/
>
>Thank you for your time.
>
>Regards,
>
>Peter Krantz
>