Don’t think accessibility audit alone will help making things accessible. It can even mean ineffective use of resources as there are several things you need to consider before just auditing.
Tag: WCAG-EM
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Concentrating on WCAG alone can feel like accessibility is always binary. When thinking about all the success criteria of the WCAG we can quickly conclude that there is not a single medium sized website in the world that conforms totally. A reflection on perfectionism, conformance and reality.
Writing a blog post on the 25th of December allows me to write about wishes. And one of them is to have better tools for accessibility auditing.
This post tries to describe what I would like to get from the tool. Realistically, noting too advanced.
What would I have in an automatic accessibility testing tool if I could have anything that is possible with today’s technology?
Well, I would start at the beginning – clear scope and known priorities is a start and sometimes we can’t really cover all that when we have to choose where we need to focus. Next, I would like to teach the tool, so that it will be more and more independent. And because I like to stand for my decisions – I would like to use the blockchain to prove my efforts and fixes. Words can be empty, deeds talk.
Before you order your accessibility audit you should read this article of mine. I try to be objective and constructive and present the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses of accessibility audits.
I was asked if I can issue “WCAG certificate” for a website, so I decided to investigate what would that actually mean as we all know that sites and mobile apps are constantly evolving and changing and even if they conform to WCAG they may not the following day. What would then mean to issue a WCAG certified certificate and still be ethical and the right thing to do?
What would I want from my Accessibility-as-a-Service provider? What would be the ideal here when we know that automatic testing is absolutely not enough? We must also get people as a part of the service – accessibility specialists and people with disabilities. And when done from start to end it is way more efficient compared to only using it at the end.
External agency made an accessibility audit. It provided a lot of possible solutions. In this post I try to make it easier to act on this audit. Breaking results into responsibilities, then prioritizing the issues and finally estimating and fixing them can be one way of doing so.
To claim that our product is accessible needs more than just WCAG audit that did not discover any fails. Real users, people with disabilities are the only one that can really reflect on the accessibility of our products. That’s why we should include them in all reasonable parts of our production processes. Otherwise we may think we deliver accessibility but the truth can be opposite.
Automatic tests can help a bit. WCAG evaluation methodology provides a good start for test focus. And if we add page popularity scoring and simple page complexity scoring, then we can really focus on the potentially difficult pages in our manual testing efforts.
Extremely valuable documentation that reveals some interesting points about future of Web Accessibility Directive monitoring methods, tools and also some less clarified reporting matters. The accessibility statement automatic analysis will most certainly also have a central role and it is worth following on the Accessibility Conformance Testing rules that are the engine of all automatic tools out there.
2020 was a special year and not only negative, it was especially positive for the accessibility, both for the world and for me as well.
Is it better to hire external consultants for accessibility assessment or is it better that it is made by the software vendor? I would say that both has its pros and cons and that combination works best.
I have now evaluated some simple and complex websites, and even a whole banking digital presence and here are some notes and thoughts about lessons learned.
Accessibility team as a team of members of other teams that are motivated to take a proactive role in their primary team – so that all teams can really implement accessibility efforts coherently.
Sometimes a short checklist is all we need to get our minds set and that we do not forget about important things. This is my short(er) version for designers and developers…
After researching on the net I’ve decided to pour some thoughts of mine on the brilliant WCAG-EM report tool for web accessibility evaluation
Web accessibility iniative on testing – valuable resource with a short reflection from me