It is more work to fix problems discovered late in a process than to do things right from the start.Testing is often rushed, omitted, or ignored thanks to such pressures. Projects tend to run over-time and over-budget.Tacking on testing at the end of the development process has two risks:
#HTML INSPECTOR W3 SOFTWARE#
“Test early, test often” is an old software engineering saying. In this article of the Web Standards Curriculum, I will discuss approaches to evaluating web accessibility, both from the perspective of establishing formal compliance and from the perspective of maximizing accessibility. However, they are a supplement, not a replacement, for empathic imagination, technical ingenuity, and talking to users. But what if the film-loving teenager is deaf and needs captions for the films she watches? What if the 50-year old bank manager is blind and uses special technology (like a screen reader) which is unfamiliar to the evaluator in order to interact with his desktop environment and web browser?Īccessibility guidelines and tools help bridge these experience gaps. If you are trying to evaluate the usability or accessibility of your web site, putting yourself in the place of a film-loving teenager or a 50-year old bank manager using your site is difficult, even before disabilities are considered. Accessibility evaluation must take account of what it is like to experience the web with different senses and cognitive abilities and of the various unusual configuration options and specialist software that enable web access to people with particular disabilities. Voice chat like Skype is great for the blind, whereas video chat is a boon for sign language users.ĭisabilities pose special challenges when working out how easy a product is to use, because they can introduce additional experience gaps between users and evaluators. Different websites, and different webs, serve different needs with different technology. As our understanding of human needs evolves and as technology adapts to those needs, accessibility requirements will change as well and current standards will be outdated. It is a nexus of human needs and technology. Moreover, web accessibility is a goal, not a yes/no setting. Such weaknesses can lead those with good intentions astray and may be exploited by those seeking to rubberstamp inaccessible products.
Ideally, the two would be the same, but any given standard may fail to: However, it is important to distinguish between complying with a standard and maximizing the accessibility of a web site. In order to be fair to all, governments and other organizations try to adhere to various web accessibility standards, such as the US federal government’s Section 508 legislation and the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Laws and public opinion frown upon discriminating against people with disabilities. The end goal, in both usability and accessibility, is to discover how easily people can use a web site and feed that information back into improving future designs and implementations.Īccessibility evaluation is more formalized than usability testing generally. Web accessibility testing is a subset of usability testing where the users under consideration have disabilities that affect how they use the web. Some is not.Ĭurrent information is available from Evaluating Web Accessibility Overview. Some of the information is still relevant. 7 Communicating the results of accessibility testing.5.3 Screening and using end-user assistive technology.5.1 Semi-automated accessibility checkers.3.4 The importance of the user interface.
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