Attendee Wiki

QuickAndDirtyWebAccessibility

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Quick & Dirty Accessibility Testing

Callie Carroll @hylaweb

  • ADA has a lot of mysterious requirements.. including "Section 508": if you work w/any govt agency or get govt funds (edu, etc), you have to address it. Need to find an expert who knows it.
  • some experience, task, building, etc, is accessible regardless of ability or disability. Words matter... disability is a social construct: a person is not disabled; a person has a disability.
  • many forms: vision (incl colorblindness), hearing, motion/dexterity, tactile feedback, cognitive ability. "The only minority you can join at any time."

Tactics:

  • Testing that semantic meaning is preserved without styles, images: in Firefox: Web Developer Toolbar (by Chris Petter) can linearize page, turn images off, etc., or view in Lynx.
  • Add meaningful "alt" attributes on all images (incl pretty text headers - CSS Zen)
  • hidden Skip Navigation / Skip to Content link
  • Usability is accessiblity too: do the Mom test
  • Sitemaps are still useful
  • your keyboard shortcuts might interfere with screenreader keys
  • tables for layout are bad; tables for tabular data are ok
  • Check your code & make sure it passes basic W3C validation
  • Bad to have different (accessible / nonaccessible) versions
  • put all form input elements before the submit button (eg, "remember me")
    • PDFs can be marked up to be accessible

Resources:

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