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Accessibility Tester - The What and the Why of Accessibility

Personal Web-site of Mark Faben - freelance Web-Accessibility Tester

Accessibility testing is a process to determine the extent to which a website is able to meet the needs of all potential users. Of course, Accessibility Testing concentrates on users indemnified as 'disabled', but many accessibility aspects to websites benefit all users. For example, accessibility driven websites often have better SEO performance, work easier on mobile devices, and are easier for non-disabled and disabled customers alike to navigate and use.

Any customer disabled or not will quickly leave a site which they find hard to use due to failures in usability and accessibility.

'Accessibility', itself, can be viewed as the extent to which anyone can use a website, irrelevant of their disability, competence and the web browsing technology they are using.

A fully accessible site is one designed to use the latest web technologies (E.G., multimedia), whilst accommodating the needs of those using alternative technologies and methods of accessing the site.

Accessibility testing on your website can lead to:

A truly accessible and usable website
An increased understanding of blind and disabled users and "buy-in" into accessibility
Open your website to a wider potential audience - potentially increasing profitability
Enable you to meet UK and European legal requirements for website accessibility
Improve your websites position/rank in popular search providers such as Google- many features which aid in Accessibility have beneficial implications for SEO

"Disabled" May include people with:

Visual impairments -- registered blind, colour blind, tunnel vision, cataracts, etc
Motor disabilities (preventing them from using a mouse for example)
Cognitive disabilities (who have difficulty understanding complex sentences)
Hearing difficulties (who need transcripts or visual alerts of any audio content)

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The original version of these guidelines, WCAG 1.0 dates back to 1999, and are largely out of date now with changes in web standards, design and technologies. However, for some sites (such as this one), where content is predominantly plain HTML, these guidelines are still adequate 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 criticisms 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 which 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 identical 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.

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Page last modified: Wednesday, 15 September 2010 22:14