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Re: accessibility without testing?

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From: Gareth Dart
Date: Mar 13, 2008 9:10AM

"It has always been my understanding that in order to consistently
create accessible pages, particularly pages which are accessible to
screen reader users, it is necessary to conduct testing with assistive
technology. I.E. before you can say for sure something is accessible,
someone has to go check. Is this view accurate? Is there a more
automated way of ensuring accessibility that I'm unaware of?"

Several people have already pointed out that automated accessibility
testing is only part of a proper accessibility testing framework. It
is, however, better than the alternative all too many designers still
take, which is to do almost nothing, either because of a lack of
awareness of web accessibility issues, or a lack of resources to
undertake testing. In such cases it's far preferable that a designer
runs his pages through an automated accessibility testing tool of some
kind and corrects at least the most glaring accessibility errors rather
than publish the page 'as is'. It would be great if they went on from
that point to do proper testing, but where this isn't possible then the
benefits brought around by automated tools shouldn't be understated.

Cheers,

Gareth