Testing for Web Accessibility - Access U

Presenter: Jim Thatcher.

Who just totally impressed me by being the first person I’ve heard on this side of the pond to say “Wu-cahg” :)

Web Accessibility: web resources are accessible if people with disabilities can use them as effectively as non-disabled people (UT Accessibility Institute)

IBM Web Accessibility Guidelines: http://ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/accessweb.html

WCAG2.0 - now has levels instead of priorities. 12 guidelines, 56 success criteria. “A”, “AA”, “AAA”.

Testability is key
All WCAG2.0 success criteria are written to be testable.
Good example: WCAG1.0 just said “sufficient contrast”. WCAG2.0 gives metric. www.wat-c.org/tools/CCA/1.1

Looked at example of flickr.com — pink on grey 3.5, blue on grey 4.96. (4:1 satisfies level 2)

Tools aren’t yet prepared to support WCAG2.0, so use existing tools, but keep WCAG2.0 in mind.

Testable? Automatic tests?

  • Testable by a computer vs requiring judgement
  • Only 25% can be detected by computer (Mike Cooper) I guess 35% on the pre-course questionnaire
  • Many claim compliance due to automated testing

Web Tools

Cynthiasays — not a big fan
webexact — wasn’t able to get anything to work
Standards-schmandards - very extensive report
erigami -
has a desktop beta. report is short and usable, can switch from issues view to a map. [site was down for a live demo....]

In general, turn off warnings because you don’t want to get that on every page.

Gez Lemon did an evaluation of free tools, and found they didn’t do a very good job.

That being said….


  • A-Prompt     from U of T allows you to save changes locally
  • U of Illinois has a functional accessibility evaluator, less so about guidelines. He’s not so sure it’s a great idea..
  • WAVE (Utah State) - he likes as it displays inline. Not sure if this started on this site, or from Bobby.

There are also a number of desktop tools - Lift, Ramp, InFocus and Bobby. Ranges from $69 to $1795. Enterprise tools: webKing and WebXM. He prefers webKing.

He contacted people from different desktop tools, Lift was responsive and corrected what he commented on.

Lift: has four panels - has interactive checks (”is this table a data table”). They only ask those sorts of questions if they think it is, to clarify. Lists errors for the specific page, as well as the code. Clicking on error in list shows its location in the top panel.

Compares commercial products in Chpt 13 of his book.

Example: how link text is handled.
testing tools and link text results: (http://jimthatcher.com/testing4.htm)
Score of 40 was perfect — Ramp got 38.

Integrated tools: Dreamweaver
Human Review: notepad (source code) screen readers, special issue tools (colour contrast), toolbars, Jim’s favelets.

“I don’t know anyone who’s sighted who can use JAWS for more than 40 minutes” :)

Toolbars “best thing to happen to accessibility”

Very important to view pages without stylesheets!

IBM Accessibility Testing (Matt King et al)

  • Monitoring checkable errors
  • Starting ~1999 - all IBM.com (13 million pages including intranet)
  • First with Bobby, then home grown tools
  • Sent error reports to managers and VPs
  • CSUN Paper, 004: **didn’t get the correct link, but google found me this: http://blogs.csuchico.edu/ik/2007/03/22/csun-ibm-case-study/
  • detectable error way down after ~5 years
  • Human Review — needed turn around time of 3 min. But toolbars don’t do what testing tools do
  • Favelets: http://www.jimthatcher.com/favelets/

He’s testing presidential candidates sites for accessibility every week.

***TODO: look more into links list. looked at travelocity site, the whole idea of “map” “map” “map” for each hotel. Jim mentioned if you were going through the links, you’d know context as the link directly before was for the hotel, but I thought links lists came through alphabetically? Or is that a (darned) user setting?