WAVE to test for accessibility October 1, 2008
Posted by ppang in Designing for web accessibility.Tags: accessibility, Add new tag, WAVE
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I find WAVE useful to quickly identify areas where there are accessibility issues. The report does not provide you with the solution for each accessibility issue as it assumes that the user is familiar with the accessibility requirements and hence should able to fix the issues identified.
My personal experience is that it is best to first identify the accessibility requirements to be fulfilled and how these can be done before the online course is built. Not only must the ICT person be familiar with the accessibility requirements, the learning designer plays an important role in providing meaningful captions, alternate texts and FLASH exercises in alternative format which is accessible by in our case, the visually impaired students.
Read about the latest on WAVE in http://webaim.org/blog/update-on-wave/. You can learn more about how to use WAVE in WebAIM’s WAVE article.
WebAIM is currently conducting a survey to gather information about the preferences of screen reader users. Results will be reported as aggregated summaries and will be published in approximately March 2009. Would be interesting to see how the data will impact on the development choices for those creating accessible web content!
After long 8 years in development, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is now finalised and has reached the recommendation status. This means that WCAG 2.0 has replaced WCAG 1.0 to be the standard document for accessibility.
Refer to http://webaim.org/blog/wcag-20-finalized/ for details.
WebAIM has has published a WCAG 2.0 Checklist. Its objective is to provide an easy-to-use, understandable checklist for evaluating or implementing WCAG 2.0. You may check it out at http://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist
Read about the initial results of WebAim’s screen reader survey at http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/
A few quick observations from the preliminary survey results:
- there is no typical screen reader user (diverse abilities and preferences exist screen reader users)
- there is a very strong favorability toward headings and
- very high level of difficulty with Flash content
Interesting colour contrast checker to check out!
http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/