Dear all,
VoiceOver is a piece of assistive technology that can be used in user testing (or in manual expert tests). However, novice users working with it, especially
without knowledge of accessibility practices, will often make key errors. The examples that James lists below are excellent, but things that are not always obvious
to novice users, nor are the design solutions particularly clear. For example, the "playing with building blocks" actually is voiced as a link leading to the shop first
before the picture. Further, that image appears to be not providing information to the user about the shop, but instead is a decoration for people with vision.
Such decorative features should in fact not have an alternative text at all, but should have an empty alt text that looks like this: alt=""
There are three types of testing that we use at University of York for accessibility testing:
1) Automated testing - this is the use of automated tools to pick up errors on some success criteria. These tools check approximately 20% of the issues
raised by the WAI as problems for disabled users. So for an example, checking if an alternative text is present or not, that can be done automatically.
2) Manual testing - using a combination of tools checking those guidelines that can't be tested automatically. For example, going back to the alternative
text example, if you have a picture of a cat and an alternative text that says "This is an elephant" then that text is clearly wrong. An automatic test can't
do this check.
3) User testing - have a set of users come in and use their assistive technologies to perform high priority (and some lower priority) tasks on the site and
collect problems for redesign.
All of these have their place, with the last being our gold star testing. If you are recruiting a company to do accessibility testing, and from the sounds of things
likely that is a good option, you may want to ask them how they do their testing.
***SHAMELESS PLUG***
As a note: the University of York offers continuing professional development courses in accessibility design and evaluation. You can come to one of our
regular courses, or we can come to your organisation to do the training with your team.
***SHAMELESS PLUG***
Cheers,
Chris Power
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Christopher Power, PhD.
Lecturer
Human Computer Interaction Research Group
CSE/241, Department of Computer Science
University of York, Deramore Lane, York YO10 5GH
Phone: +44 (0)1904325673 Fax: +44 (0)1904 432767
Email: [log in to unmask]; Skype: cdspower; Twitter: cdspower
Web: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~cpower
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On 15 Apr 2011, at 10:45, Frankie Roberto wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 5:34 PM, James Morley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Can I ask what tools and services anyone uses for accessibility testing,
>> especially any particular recommendations?
>>
>
> If you've got a Mac, then there's an accessibility tool called 'VoiceOver'
> built in, and something I've started to do recently is to actually try using
> it on various different sites (including ones I've built).
>
> You can activate it by holding down cmd and F5. Then it'll read out
> webpages when they load, or you can interrupt and navigate through either
> the page content or the links on the page. It takes a little while to figure
> out the keyboard commands, but there's a tutorial you can go through which
> soon gets you up and running.
>
> When using it though, it's amazing how quickly you learn things you can fix
> with your website to make it more user-friendly for those using readers. For
> example, all those alt tags that you wrote in good faith thinking that you
> were helping accessibility often make no sense in the context of the page.
> (I often tell people that, in 95% of cases, empty alt tags are more
> appropriate than filled-in ones).
>
> Even big websites have obvious flaws. For example, the first thing you hear
> when using VoiceOver on the BBC homepage is:
>
> "visited link British Broadcasting Corporation BBC British Broadcasting
> Corporation" - a bit much when all it needs to say is "BBC" (which is you
> see when viewing the page).
>
> To take another example, the Science Museum website reads out the alt tag
> "Science Museum logo" as the first thing on the page (should just be
> "Science Museum") and currently has a picture on the page with the alt tag
> "playing with building blocks" which leads to the shop.
>
> Most of the websites I've ever built have issues like this too - so I don't
> mean to be too critical - but it just goes to show that if you don't see (or
> hear) the alt tags, they usually go unnoticed!
>
> VoiceOver isn't the only, or even the most popular, screen reader, so you
> probably shouldn't rely on it too much. But, given that it's free (if you
> have a Mac), and only two button-presses away, it seems like there's no good
> excuse for not testing websites using it now and again.
>
> Frankie
>
> --
> Frankie Roberto
> Experience Designer, Rattle
> 0114 2706977
> http://www.rattlecentral.com
>
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