Accessibility testing is a process that involves determining the ease with which users with a variety of disabilities can successfully complete common tasks on your website.
Accessibility testing on your website can lead to:
"Disabled" May include people with:
In the UK, the nationally recognised (and to an extent European recognized), standards for web accessibility are those set out by the world wide web consortium (W3C)- the Web Content accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The original version of these guidelines, WCAG 1.0 date back to 1999, and are largely out of date now with changes in web standards, design and technologys. However, for some sites (such as this one), where content is predominatly plain HTML, these guidelines are still adiquat for determining the accessibility of this type of content.
However, the WCAG 2.0 guidelines are now well established as the more recent and updated guidelines, which in some way replace WCAG 1.0. Although there are many critisisms of these guidelines, they do in some ways develop above and beyond the earlier guidelines, and are more suited to websites with multimedia rich content, new media, or web2.0.
I am able to determine dwhich of these guidelines is appropriate for any given website and then test to either of these industry standards.
Checking a website to the WCAG is often termed "conformance testing" or "Accessibility Audit"; Effectively these are identicle terms, both involve ensuring a website meets all of the criteria as set down in either version 1.0 or 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
In addition to guideline based Conformance or audit testing, I can as part of the testing, or in addition to, conduct user testing. This may discover additional Accessibility problems, and often usability issues related to disabled individuals use of a given website.
