Wednesday, October 09, 2013

WAI Easy Check Document Not Useful

The  World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have issued a draft "Easy Checks - A First Review of Web Accessibility" for comment. The document is intended to help assess the accessibility of a web page. However it uses concepts which a non-expert will not be familiar with. It is unlikely that many people will have the patience to study this document. Instead I suggest encouraging the use of automated checkers, which give the user a quick automated check, explain how to do additional manual checks and provide links to detailed information.

Those wanting more detailed understanding should be encouraged to undertake a training course on web accessibility. This could be one of the free on-line courses available, or one at a vocational training institution.

I talked about my experience assessing the Sydney 2000 Olympic website and providing some advice for the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

1 comment:

  1. As an example the document uses the phrase "Web Accessibility" in
    the title and then says "accessibility of a web page" in the first
    sentence. But there is no explanation of what "accessibility" is.

    Further down the page says "FF Toolbar", "IE WAT", "WCAG Links",
    "Practicing with BAD", which will not make much sense to the uninitiated.

    I suggest explaining what the web feature is for, what a good one is and
    then how to check it. For example, the document introduces page titles
    by saying: "Page titles are ... shown in the window title bar in some
    browsers ...". But it does not actually say what a page title is.

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