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Re: Validation equals Accessibility?

for

From: tedd
Date: Apr 16, 2007 9:20AM

At 12:29 PM +0100 4/16/07, Gary Williamson wrote:
>Generator Microsoft Word 11 (filtered medium) I' m racking my brains
>to think of reasons why, when I validate my page using W3C validator
>my page is valid but not necessarily accessible. I can think of a
>couple but would like some opinions from people who work more
>directly in this field. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Also does anyone use any software that checks for accessibility
>rather than validity?
>

Gary:

There are a lot of terms that appear related like accessible and
validation, but their focus is different.

Validation simply means that your web page meets with the W3C guide
lines, such as:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator.html#validate-by-uri

Of course the W3C wants to promote accessible web sites, but their
main intent is to get everyone on board with compliance to standards,
hence, no accessibility validation (yet).

Whereas, accessibility has different concerns AND those concerns are
widespread and diverse. No single test will tell you if your web page
is accessible or not. But you can try to solve problems via links
like these:

http://www.etre.com/tools/accessibilitycheck/
http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/index.php?section=report
http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/index.html
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
http://webxact.watchfire.com/
http://www.accessify.com/
http://www.hermish.com/
http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php

And these are just a fraction of the online references you can find
if you look.

Hope this helps -- and thanks for asking, more people should.

Cheers,

tedd
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