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How to give a short accessibility improvement summary on a very complex and messy webpage

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Sep 1, 2011 9:30PM

Yea wise people.

I certainly will not (and havenot in the past) post questions for
every individual page I come across.
My job is somewhat unique in that I am asked to check quickly if a
page is ok, as a screen reader user, if not, to give some
recommendations to quickly fix the issues and improve the situation.
Neither my sallary/work percentage or position allows me to dig
extremely deep into the code. I run Sitesifter (which is often a good
tool, though it is just crashing on this particular page), and I check
for basic html and Javascript issues.
Generally this works very well, and I manage to get considerable
improvements with a relatively short list of recommended reading and
descriptionof specific issues. But now I've met my match.

I have been asked to give an evaluation of

http://www.okbeint.is (Icelandic dealer for HP)
This is an extremely fancy JQuery/AJAX page with, what seems to be
some sort of animation, at least it slows down my screen reader a lot
and there seems to be a carosel of photos that move or switch randomly
(correct me I am wrong, I am blind, and therefore have to interpret
the source code).
I also do not see part of the page, indicated in the Source, links
such as "um okkur" and "English" appear in the code, but I don't see
them.

Basically, this page is very bad, I am sure it is very good looking,
but I am not sure, in this scenario, where to begin recommending
changes.
There are a few simple issues, such as better use of headings, better
usage of alt tags for images etc. But those are not really the heart
of the issue.

Should I point them to reading up on all sorts of accessibility
(probably not effective, there is a lot to know), should I point them
directly to ARIA (it would solve some of these problems), or do you
have any rule of thumb as to how to pick out the most pressing issues
and start with them.
If anyone has useful input on how I could get maximum improvement by
giving them a summary of 2 pages or less, what to concentrate on, and
how to suggest improvements, without suggesting they write the blessed
thing from scratch, it would be a very useful input to me. :)
Does the screen reader emulator plug in for Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fangs-screen-reader-emulator/


give an accurate picture of how confusing this page is, in other
words, does it handle AJAX code sufficiently well to give an accurate
presentation of the screen reading experience?

Thanks very much
-B