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Re: accessibility without testing?

for

From: Travis Smith
Date: Mar 13, 2008 9:20AM

As an Individual who works for a software developer, and a user of JAWS.
I completely agree that nothing will replace good old fashion human
testing. Because no matter how good a software gets it will never to
have the leave of understanding and learning ability that the human
brain has. Therefore, it will not catch enough of the problems to be
able to say that a site is accessible.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Steve Green
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 9:41 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] accessibility without testing?

Firstly, testing for compliance with the WCAG only tells you if a
website
'should' be accessible. It does not tell you that it 'is' accessible.
Automated tools can only make a decision about 25% of the WCAG
checkpoints,
so a significant degree of manual testing would be required to verify
WCAG
compliance.

To be sure a site 'is' accessible, you would need to conduct user
testing
with the user groups you are concerned about, taking into account the
wide
variations in users' level of ability and the various user agents and
assistive tchnologies they use. That is invariably prohibitively
expensive.

In short, automated testing, manual testing and user testing provide
increasing levels of confidence that a site is accessible but you can't
have
absolute certainty.

Steve




-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Aaron Cannon
Sent: 13 March 2008 14:30
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] accessibility without testing?

Hi all.

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?

I know that there have been some products marketed to be able to do so,
but
I was under the impression that they were just snake oil. I also know
of a
couple products, which are quite good at identifying potential problem
areas, but that they can't possibly identify them all, nor are they
immune
to false-positives.

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Aaron Cannon

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