WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Hardware and Software required for Accessibility Testing

for

From: Geof Collis
Date: Dec 3, 2009 3:00PM

I've had cases where people said they tested their sites with focus
groups, claimed it was accessible but clearly wasn't and they take
their findings to the bank and damn anyone who states to the contrary.

cheers

Geof




At 02:40 PM 12/3/2009, you wrote:
>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
>