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Re: Hardware and Software required for Accessibility Testing

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From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 3, 2009 12:45PM

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Keith Parks wrote:

> And I don't mean to discount the value of real-world testing, but if
> your content is properly structured and coded to standards and "best
> practices", and your presentation markup is tested for color contrast,

Keith brings up a really good, and perhaps somewhat controversial
point. For the vast majority of content, you can be reasonably sure
that it is accessible by following the guidelines and using evaluation
tools to verify compliance and accessibility (to the limited extent
that they can do so). Is there really a need then for intensive user
agent and user testing? In many cases, I would say no. It would be a
bit overkill to test a basic page of content with a group of users on
multiple user agents and assistive technologies if you're pretty sure
you've implemented accessibility correctly.

On the other hand, the only way to absolutely ensure screen reader
accessibility is to test in a screen reader, for example. And this is
certainly necessary for more advanced and interactive content - things
for which the guidelines and standards don't provide much direction,
or for things like Flash or PDF or AJAX, where evaluation can't be
automated. And for things like this, having 'experts' that understand
the complexities of accessibility certainly are better suited to do
the work.

So the key is finding a balance that puts evaluation and development
resources in areas that will result in a cost-effective, yet highly
accessible product.

> As Jared mentioned the other day...

>> Our
>> approach with WAVE is to ignore compliance and to focus on
>> accessibility - to show you everything we can about accessibility
>> issues and let you determine what that means for your site's
>> compliance.

This doesn't at all suggest that WAVE wouldn't be useful in compliance
testing. We think it's VERY useful. The point is that we don't tell
you if you're compliant or not (though any error in WAVE is almost
certainly a compliance issue). Only a human can do that. Instead, we
reveal as much about accessibility as we can and leave it up to you to
determine whether the content is accessible or compliant or whatever.

Jared