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

for

From: tedd
Date: Apr 16, 2007 10:10AM

At 5:08 PM +0200 4/16/07, Peter Krantz wrote:
>Jon,
>
>Thank's for your reply. I am not sure I completely understand the FAE so
>forgive me if some of these assumptions are wrong. Some issues I found
>developers to have with online tools in general are:
>
> 1. They are online meaning that it takes too much time to test a
> single page you are developing.
> 2. They require manual intervention to do the test (which takes time).
> 3. They typically provide feedback that you have to be able to
> interpret to make use of. E.g. some warnings from the FAE may be
> irrelevant but it is hard to know if you don't know accessibility.
>
>Is it possible to integrate FAE with functional testing tools such as Watir,
>HTMLUnit or Selenium?
>
>What type of user do you see using the FAE?
>
>Regards,
>
>Peter

Peter:

Not speaking for Jon, but rather as a user of services like theirs,
I'm just a web developer trying to conform to standards as best I can.

I don't see any problems with online checking. Online checking helps
me see problems as I develop my code. I can't imagine any better way
to do this (a topic for another discussion).

As for [1] that's just nonsense. It may take too much time for
developers to fix their errors, but that's not the fault of the test
but rather the ignorance of the developer.

As for [2] again nonsense. It take very little time to test a page --
what are we talking about -- less than a minute? If developers are
concerned about wasting a minute to see where they went wrong, then
they are not concerned about their code, much less accessibility.
Give me a break -- any developer worth his salt is concerned about
his code.

As for [3] knowing what accessibility is, very few developers are
going to fully understand being denied access until it happens to
them. All they can do until then (hopefully never) is to follow
guidelines and learn. That means to know what the barriers are, how
to remove them, and do it -- that's accessibility.

There's no magical cure, no shortcut -- just plain hard work in
learning, understanding, and applying solutions.

And accessibility is something that all of us have to learn -- even
FAE. For example, as was pointed out to me recently in my site, the
color that FAE uses for their links (#0066CC on #FFFFFF) doesn't pass
the contrast test for accessibility.

You see accessibility travels deep and we all are going to have to be
aware of the problems. Even those of us who think we know better --
we all can learn.

As for cost, not that you asked, but contributing another up to 12
percent more customers to any sales base has to be considered
seriously. Accessibility is not one of those "being sensitive to the
needs of the unfortunate" things, but rather a solid and well founded
business decision. It makes dollars as well as sense to be accessible.

Thanks for asking.

Cheers,

tedd

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