Evaluating Website Accessibility Series
Roger Johansson posted at the 456 Brea St. a very interesting series of articles about Evaluating Website Accessibility. The first part titled Background and Preparation, is an introduction to WAI and to the necessary tools that will help you to evaluate the accessibility of your website. Roger focused on Firefox with a set of very useful extension, I find it great to show also the power of firefox not only as a browser but also as a developers tool.
In more and more countries across the world it is becoming required for government and other public service websites to be based on standards and follow accessibility guidelines. That in turn is making it necessary for the people involved in building and maintaining these sites to be able to build accessible websites and evaluate website accessibility.
In the second part, titled Basic Checkpoints, and introducing also the most useful checkpoints that a developer should do to evaluate the accessibility of a website. The basics checkpoints are :
1. Validate HTML and CSS
2. No frames, please
3. Automated accessibility checking tools
4. Images and alternative text
5. Make sure that JavaScript is unobtrusive
6. Increase text size
7. Look for semantic markup
8. Disable CSS
9. Use Fangs to emulate a screen reader
The third part, is coming soon will be about takeing a look at things that are difficult to test with automated tools and require more time and/or experience to evaluate manually. An excellent roundup to accessibility in three parts, that I find it very useful.
