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Re: Best way to single out 3 to 5 "most accessible" sites out of a list of 60 or so

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jan 10, 2013 7:44PM

That's quite a challenge. Although the home pages are important, I would not rely on just testing them because they are often unique and totally unrepresentative of the rest of the website. I would therefore recommend assessing 3 to 5 pages per site.

As a sighted user it is easy for me to scan a few pages in a few seconds and pick out features that are likely to cause accessibility barriers. As a screen reader user it would take you much longer to do that, so I agree that you would need to use an automated tool unless you can get someone to identify potential issues for you to assess.

You then run into the problem that the tools often give false positives so you have quite a bit of verification to do. Even if the results are correct, how do you compare them? Simply adding up the number of non-compliances and picking the 5 sites with the lowest scores is pretty crude.

This sounds like one to two days' work, and there is a significant risk of recommending sites that are unworthy, and vice versa. Personally, I would probably decline to do this on the terms you have described unless I could get help from other people. I would offer to assess a few sites but my Icelandic is rather poor.

Steve Green