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

for

From: Peter Krantz
Date: Apr 16, 2007 11:10AM

On 4/16/07, tedd < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> 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.


Thank you for your feedback. Maybe your experience is from smaller sites
where you didn't employ a test driven approach?. If you have a large
application and work with TDD you want to run all tests as soon as you are
about to check in code (which may happen several times a day). Any
disturbance in this process impacts available development time.

Going through each view combination in your application will require you to
run through the process manually, stopping and sending the resulting HTML to
one of these online validators and then interpret the result. Manually
stepping through just one of the scenarios in an application in a recent
project I participated in took around 20 minutes. That's why many
development projects use an automated test tool like Watir or Selenium.


> 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.


See above. If you need to run all tests (and interpret the result) for many
pages it will take a lot of time.

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


That's why I am looking into tools to make it easier for developers. It
shouldn't be hard work to increase basic accessibility. Maybe that's why
many modern software development projects still miss this point?

Regards,

Peter