Previous Global Accessibility Awareness Day, in 2021, I decided to do a quick automatic accessibility audit on most prominent and most viewed Slovenian websites and call it an Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day. I got some positive feedback from the limited audience of Slovenians that are into accessibility and also some negative feedback that went mostly on my choice of writing in English and not in Slovenian language.
I should probably make a separate version of the content in Slovenian language, but then again, I am currently alone in this project. Secondly – I really believe that writing in English actually does more to building awareness to be honest. People of Slovenia are usually very good in English and especially people that are involved in the production of digital products are for sure very good in English.
At the same time there is a lot of professional terminology that has to be used when writing about accessibility – for example whole Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). So if they are not translated to Slovenian (and they are not), I would have to first invest into that and at least get that translated. Then again – I am not the best translator and am sure that other professionals would be much more effective.
Goals – build upon first analysis and reflect on official WAD reports
Goals for second Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day (SAAD) were simple;
- What can be learned from automatic accessibility audit from first SAAD in 2021?
- As we just got our first official Slovenian report on the Web Accessibility Directive for the public sector we can now reflect a bit on it.
Automatic accessibility audit reveals a lot about code and something about content and design
Automatic testing is sometimes underappreciated and often over-appreciated – we all wish it would cover all the possibilities for us and won’t produce doubtful results. Sadly that is not the reality and we must start with explaining that automatic testing with no manual verification can sometimes produce faults that can distort the whole picture.
On the other hand we can totally trust automatic tests that check code-based errors, because syntax doesn’t lie, at least not so much as other tests can. Missing language attributes, missing alt attributes and so on are extremely correct and contrasts can often be wrong. Although providers of automatic tests to their best to make the tests reliable we can quickly fall into situations where some scenarios just aren’t possible to be tested and therefore tests can show a fail or a pass where the reality is the opposite.
But nevertheless – automatic tests are the quickest and cheapest possibility to scale an audit, especially when we need to test hundreds or thousands of different websites. So using them when we need to process a big sample is the most efficient way.
There were no surprises actually – automatic tests did not detect a single URL with no WCAG success criteria failures. I’ve checked some with low count manually, just to be fair, but did find the automatic tests to be correct. Please check the Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day webpage and read about the details there.
Reflections on Web Accessibility Directive reports for Slovenian public sector
Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) was accepted as one of the most important accessibility directives all over the European Union and beyond. It is an amazing effort towards a more accessible world for the people of EU, as the public sector needs to conform to WCAG 2.1 on level AA and beyond. In practice we probably know that it is not an easy task, especially being aware of the dynamics on the web and on mobile apps. You can conform to something and next moment you maybe fail due to some minor fail.
But nevertheless reading the first official report on WAD checks in Slovenia is invaluable. A lot has to be done but a lot has already been done and it is always a good sign when people start to pass beyond awareness and really making true efforts towards more accessible web.
Please check the Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day webpage and read about the details there.
Work in progress
As mentioned in the start of this post – single person can only go so far. I will do my best to update the results and to build on awareness. Accessibility deserves it and especially in countries that did not invest a lot on it because of the lack of awareness we all should contribute as much as we can. I am also looking forward to European Accessibility Act that will try to reach beyond public sector and also contribute to private sector as it may do a lot of positive for overall accessibility awareness of the whole private sector.
Time will show. Everything is a work in progress.