Very belated thanks to everyone who responded to this request.
Chris, can I ask which tool you use for your automated testing? I've been playing around with a 30-day trial of Powermapper's SortSite and it seems better than most I've tried previously. Just need someone to create an automated 'create more hours in the day' tool!
Regards, James
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James Morley [log in to unmask]
Website Manager Tel. +44 (0)20 8332 5759
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew www.kew.org
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Christopher Power
> Sent: 15 April 2011 14:10
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Accessibility testing - tools and services
>
> 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
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------------------
> 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
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------------------
> UoY Email Disclaimer
>
>
>
> 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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