Description

With guidelines and a set of helpful tools in hand, we are now ready to evaluate a website’s level of accessibility.

Process overview

The process for an audit generally follows these steps:

1. General assessment
2. Sample page list
3. Automated check
4. Manual checks
5. Screen reader checks
6. Validation check

This is a suggestion, not to a strict methodology. If there is an order that works better for you, that’s fine!

The W3C has published a very detailed Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-EM/) that you could use or at least be aware of.

Step 1 – General assessment

Starting with a blank report to record your findings (see Lesson 5), you can start by generally looking over the site and making notes on its appearance, layout, and available features.

Quickly take note of:

• Contrast - light text on light backgrounds or dark text on dark backgrounds
• Images – informative, decorative, icons, images of text, galleries
• Text – areas that are hard to read, descriptive headings and labels, reading order, text presented as images
• Forms – searches, contact and login forms
• Dynamic content - sliders, drop-down navigations, show/hide content toggles
• Tables – are they data tables (rows and columns all have meaning) or only used for on-screen layout.
• Audio or video content – the players, media alternatives
• Interactive features that may be difficult to use with a keyboard such as calendars or flash elements
• Linked files - such as PDF or Word documents

Step 2 – List the pages to be evaluated

To create a list of pages to base your audit on, choose 10-15 pages that are reasonably representative of the site, including examples of different kinds of content and functionality. The review should be sure to cover the variety of content discovered during Step 1, as well as the template elements (header, footer, navigation, etc.).

Step 3 – Automated check

Choose an automated checker (see Lesson 3) and run some sample pages through it to catch any missed issues. Note these issues in the report and for the subsequent steps.

Step 4 – Manual checks

The bulk of audit work happens through manual discovery: deeply examining markup, keyboard operability, dynamic content and form behaviours, media, etc. by following the list of WCAG 2.0 guidelines. We can use manual tools (see Lesson 3) to aid us in this process.

Step 5 – Screen reader check

Go through the sample pages with VoiceOver and NVDA to note any barriers (see Lesson 3). Try to imagine what the experience would be like if you didn’t have visual cues (if you hadn’t seen the page). Make sure there is enough information to operate the site successfully, just from the spoken text.

Step 6 – Validation check

Enter a few sample URLs into the W3C Nu HTML Checker to locate markup issues. The raw results will show all of the source code validity issues, but WCAG 2.0 success criterion 4.1.1 (Parsing) only requires a subset of these issues to be fixed:

• Unquoted attributes (under certain circumstances)
• Duplicate attributes
• Mismatched quotes on attributes
• Attributes not space separated
• Mismatched element start and end tags
• Malformed attributes

This subset can be filtered with a special “bookmarklet”. Instructions at: http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/02/wcag-2-0-parsing-error-bookmarklet/

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Task

1. Visit a large website and list 10-15 pages that represent the varied content on the site.
2. Beside each of the pages, list what areas you will investigate when you revisit these pages for a full audit (ex. dynamic slider, data table, headings, video content, etc.).
3. Post your completed task here, ensuring that the "Is this for an assignment?" dropdown is set to the name of this lesson.

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Continue to Lesson 5 - Reporting Findings »