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Accessibility Testing

There are many tools available that can test for accessibilty on websites. I will list links to those below. It is a good idea to test for accessibility using these tools and other means of testing for accessibility. One of the best ways to test if your website is accessible is finding people who have accessibilility issues to test your website. That is not always possible and the following tools are a great resource:

These are just a few of the accessibility checkers and many more can be found that can test against Section 508 and WCAG.

I have also included the text below from Project 1 of the CMWEB 150 class. The goal was to find a website, point out the accessibilty errors and fix them.

Original website: http://www.peoriaareacrimestoppers.com/index.aspx

Site review using multiple tools: I'm going to start off by running the validators that are found in the Web Developer toolbar in Chrome. The CSS Validator found 15 errors and 91 warnings and the HTML Validator found 14 errors and 6 warnings.

Functional Accessibility Evaluator 1.1: FAE found numerous errors as Navigation & Orientation and Text Equivalents got a "Partially Implemented" grade and Scripting, Styling and HTML Standards received an "Almost Complete" grade. The full report can be found here: http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/report/1338ab5bdc26bcff/summary/

AChecker - www.achecker.ca: I found this web accessibility checker while performing a Google search and I like how this checker performs. This checker found 14 known problems, 5 likely problems and 74 potential problems with the website. The problems included missing alt tags, the font element was used numerous times, some parts of the website weren't keyboard accessible and there was no language specified.

I also ran the website through WAVE, Worldspace, Cynthia Says and a few others and got similar results.

Screen Reader: I used Webanywhere for my screen reader as my JAWS trial had expired. Navigation wasn't terrible, but wasn't great. The "Submit a Web Tip" and "Web Tip Follow-up" links weren't read as links. Because many of the images didn't have any alt tags or long descriptions, it skipped right over them. The user would not have known that they were there. There was also a whole bunch of unnecessary content about margin size that wasn't displayed on the page.

Steps to making this website accessible: First off, I think will correct the validation errors with the HTML and CSS. The first thing to making any website accessible is to make sure you have valid HTML and CSS.

Looking into the website, it seems like there are lots of things that need to be fixed. Instead of trying to fix everything without altering the design, I think I am going to improve on the design as well. If I was in charge of making this website accessible, that would be the decision that I would make.

Priority 1 issues and fixes:

Priority 2 issues and fixes:

In the following website, I edited both the HTML and main CSS file. Another CSS file that was used, I completely got rid of. My edits reduced the file size by more than a half in the HTML file. The CSS file was also trimmed quite a bit. These modifications made the HTML and CSS validate. Other modifications included making the navigation out of an ordered list with CSS, tables were also eliminated and replaced by floating divs and header tags were added. There was only a h3 tag in the original website. Now there is an h1 and h2. All the scripting was removed. The website was tested with FAE, AChecker, Cynthia Says and no accessibility issues were found. I also checked the new page using Webanywhere and no issues were found.

The now accessible website is http://ccervantez.mystudentsite.net/CMWEB150/peoriaareacrimestoppers/. I did not edit any of the secondary pages and as a result, most of the navigation links don't work.