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Re: accessibility without testing?

for

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




-----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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