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Re: accessibility without testing?

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From: Steve Green
Date: Mar 13, 2008 9:40AM

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