ArticlesReader.com Menu
Newest Articles
Most Viewed Articles
ArticlesReader.com RSS
Submit Article
Login
Signup
Search the articles

Articles Main Categories
Advice
Animals
Automobiles
Business
Career
Communications
Computer Programming
Computers
Entertainment
Environment
Family
Fashion
Finance
Food
Health & Medical
Home & Garden
Humor
Internet Business
Internet Marketing
Legal
Leisure & Recreation
Marketing
Other
Politics
Reference & Education
Religion
Self Improvement
Sports
Technology & Science
Travel
Writing
Subscribe
Receive alert message from us when new articles submitted to our site for free.

Enter your name

Enter your email

Syndicate

















Related Products
Home::Web Design

The problem with automated accessibility testing tools

Author : Trenton Moss
An automated accessibility tool is a piece of software which can test a web page, or even an entire website, for accessibility. Automated accessibility tools are useful because they can save you a huge amount of time. Don't want to check images for alt text on each and every page on your website? Run the site through an automated tester and it'll do it all for you!



Automated accessibility testing tools have been around for a long time and have historically been a useful way of checking websites for accessibility. Bobby, one of the first and most well-known automated accessibility testing tools, is now almost 10 years, and although is no longer freely available, plenty of other free tools such as WebXact (http://webxact.watchfire.com/) and Wave (http://wave.webaim.org/index.jsp)do exist.



But are these tools a little too good to be true? Can you test a website for accessibility so easily? Unfortunately the answer is a resounding no. There are a number of underlying problems associated with using just automated tools to test for accessibility:



Literal interpretation of guidelines



Any automated accessibility testing tool, being a piece of software, doesn't have very much in the way of common sense. It will interpret each and every accessibility guideline literally, without bearing any other thought to what else is on the page.



The definition of the word guideline, according to Dictionary.com, is "a rule or principle that provides guidance to appropriate behaviour". A guideline simply offers guidance to what the best practice is - it shouldn't just be applied without regard to other factors.



For example, one of the W3C accessibility guidelines states that a table summary should be provided for all tables. (This summary doesn't appear on the screen, but it's read aloud to screen reader users before reading through the table content.) Table summaries are useful as they tell screen reader users what to expect in the table. However, there may be a heading directly before the table and it describes what the table is about. In this instance, this summary is essentially useless as it will just repeat what the previous heading said.



Can't check any content issues



The way that content is structured both on the page and across the website is a massive part of accessibility. A website may be perfectly coded and conform to the highest coding standards. If its content is poorly structured though, the site will prove difficult to impossible for some special needs web users.



There are a number of important accessible content considerations, none of which automated accessibility testing tools can check for. Some of these important considerations include:



- Front-loading content so that each paragraph begins with the conclusion

- Ensuring content has been broken down into manageable chunks with descriptive sub-headings

- Using lists wherever appropriate

- Ensuring that plain and simple language is used



Can't check many coding issues



The vast number of accessibility guidelines tend to be related to how the site is coded. Automated accessibility testing tools are unfortunately unable to test for many of these too. Examples of HTML-related accessibility considerations which these tools can't check for include:



- Ensuring that text is real text and isn't embedded within images

- Making sure that the site functions without the use of JavaScript or Flash

- Providing equivalent text links if using server-side image maps

- Ensuring that the structure within the HTML reflects the visual appearance (e.g. headings are labelled as headings within the HTML code)



Outdated guidelines are used



Automated accessibility testing tools generally use the W3C accessibility guidelines, which by now are over five years old. As such, a number of these guidelines are outdated and don't apply anymore. In fact, some of them are now thought to hinder accessibility rather than help, so it's best to totally ignore these guidelines.



For example, an automated accessibility testing tool will probably insist that form items contain default place holding text. It may also insist that links need to be separated by non-link text. Neither of these guidelines are relevant anymore and their implementation could make accessibility worse rather than better.



Most guidelines aren't properly checked



Automated accessibility tools can check for a number of guidelines, and can tell you when a guideline isn't being adhered to. However, when the tool claims that a guideline is being fulfilled this may in fact be a false truth.



For example, if all images contain alt text then the software will report a pass for this guideline. But what if the alt text isn't descriptive of its image? What if alt text is crammed full of nonsensical keywords for search engines? How can an automated accessibility tool possibly know this?



Warnings may be misinterpreted



The reports generated by automated accessibility tools provide warnings, as well as errors. These warnings are basically guidelines that the automated tool can't check for, but which may be errors. Often they're not, and in fact they're often not even relevant. However, some people reading a report may try to get rid of these warning messages by making the appropriate changes to their site. By doing so, they may be implementing guidelines that needn't be implemented and inadvertently lowering the website's accessibility.



Conclusion



Automated accessibility testing tools can be useful as they can save a large amount of time in performing some very basic checks for accessibility. However, they must be used with caution and they cannot be used as a stand-alone guide for accessibility checking. Indeed, some expert accessibility knowledge should always be applied in evaluating a site accessibility, perhaps in conjunction with the fantastic web accessibility toolbar (http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/) to help dramatically speed up manual checks.


Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com





This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy (Webcredible - www.webcredible.co.uk) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.





Spam emails More free articles

Related articles


  1. The Top 8 Website Sins Part Two
  2. The Top 8 Website Sins Part One
  3. 10 seconds is all it takes… (How to grab the attention of your audience with your web site)
  4. So You’re Hiring a Web Designer—You Have the Right to Demand these 7 Perks
  5. 6 Design Flaws Newbie Web Designers Make: Fool Everyone Into Thinking You Know What You're Doing
  6. Excellently Constructed Websites
  7. Web Designers Beware!
  8. Quality Website Design At An Affordable Price
  9. Website Colors That Turn Off Your Customers
  10. What The Font? – Understanding Typefaces On The Web
  11. Freelancers Bite Back!
  12. Web Design: Should You Hire Someone or Do It Yourself?
  13. Branding Web Strategy Mistakes - Brand Identity Guru
  14. Web-Safe Fonts for Your Site
  15. Web Designing Tips
  16. Good Websites Stand Out From The Masses Of Boring, Hard To Travel Sites
  17. Testament To Testimonials
  18. Reach Out To Billions
  19. Every Website is a Human Being’s Attempt at Achieving a Goal or Obtaining Happiness
  20. Give People What They Want And Watch Your Profits Soar!
  21. You Too Can Have an Amazing Website
  22. The Seven Deadly Sins of Web Business Design
  23. 10 Nifty Ways to Prolong Your Visitors at Your Website
  24. Website Design: Redecorate Your Web Site To Increase Sales
  25. Service Professions: Does Your Website Follow These 5 Simple Rules For Getting More Clients?
More related feeds
The problem with automated accessibility testing tools
Automated accessibility testing tools can be useful, but there are a number of disadvantages with relying on them.

Pathfinder Development » Rails ThreatDown!
The number four threat to Rails this week is automated testing. As Jay Fields points out on his blog, testing tools across different languages suffer from a distressing lack of consistency in how they express expectations, ...

the problem with automated accessibility testing tools
can you test a website for accessibility so easily? unfortunately the answer is a resounding no. there are a number of underlying problems associated with using just automated tools to test for accessibility: ...

New tool to help housing associations calculate 'lifetime costs ...
The BLP Life Cycle Costing Tool is a fast, accurate and automated software programme that replaces complex time consuming, manual and spreadsheet-based processes. It helps social housing development officers and accountants calculate ...

CoDe Magazine - Article: Microsoft Accessibility Testing Tools vs ...
I also describe how you can use these tools throughout the development cycle and how to incorporate them into automated and non-automated test frameworks. An Overview of the Windows Automation Frameworks. The tools I discuss in this ...

Major new accessibility features in Firefox 3.0.4
Validators - gives immediate access to the W3C HTML Validator and similar tools. Tools - gives access to a variety of automated accessibility testing tools. Keyboard - appears to enable users the option of adding extra shortcut keys. ...

Eventseer.net - 5th international workshop on automated ...
verification techniques and tools. Systematic, formal approaches to the analysis and verification can address the problems of this particular domain with automated and reliable tools that also incorporate semantic aspects. ...

Pathfinder Development » Automated Deployments Rock
What I like about capistrano, is that it leaves the maintenance page up, and gives you a log of the problem. From there you can figure out what needs to be done to fix the deployment, or you can quickly change some symlinks to revert ...

CoDe Magazine - Article: Open Accessibility
AccChecker enables testers, without prior experience with accessibility testing, to easily discover accessibility problems with Microsoft Active Accessibility and other user interface (UI) implementations. AccChecker was born from the ...

Lords of the Blog healthcheck « Lords of the Blog
We have run Survey Monkey through accessibility testing tools and a screenreader and are satisfied that they work fine on a PC environment. I appreciate, however that there may be even more accessible formats; we may look into these in ...

 

 

© 2007 articlesreader.com - All Rights Reserved