Access audit of tutorial website
The website at http://www.scotconnect.com/tutorial/ has been designed to advertise the services of an imaginary photographer called Joe Light. Please spend some time looking at the site; visit all of the pages, and read at least some of the text.
Write down any problems you have while browsing the site, also write down problems you think other users might have using the website, e.g. would a person with a visual impairment have a problem with this site, or how about someone with dyslexia?
Carry out an accessibility audit of the site
Carry out a brief accessibility audit of the tutorial website using the testing strategies outlined further down this page. Prepare to do your accessibility audit by first assembling a collection of 'bookmarklets' or favlets in your bookmark menu.
Bookmarklets are small javascript programs that you save in your bookmark list: when choosen the script applies to the page you are on.
You will find a small collection of bookmarklets on the course links page.
Additional bookmarklets can be found at:
The Web Accessiblity Toolbar is a useful tool when building or auditing a website for accessibility:
Testing strategies and Validation tools
- Browse site - jotting down thoughts about navigation and possible accessibility issues. Use Bookmarklets, Web Accessibility toolbar to check access.
- Visual check of markup and CSS - checking for DOCTYPE, obvious problems, absolute units for text sizing and so on.
- Alter your browser preferences and browse the site.
- Change the text size using browser prefs (not the zoom menu which may not be available to all users)
- Change the colour of the background and text using your browser preferences.
- Turn Javascript off in your browser (if you can), and visit the 'Contact information' page.
- Turn images off in your web browser. Empty the browser cache before browsing the site after turning off images.
- Turn off style sheets.
- Turn the colour back to the default, turn images back on and then visit http://vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php and check to see how the site would look to a person who has colour blindness.
- Browse site using a text only browser. I have access to a Linux box so I use Lynx on Linux to browse the site - you can use the Lynx Viewer at http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html.
- Run site through validators: HTML and CSS.
- Do quick check with automated web access tools: Bobby and Cynthia Says. Automated tools can help give an indication of problem areas. Also important to know what problems these tools are highlighting as many users and organisation consider them to be of great importance.
- Do more detailed accessibility checking based on level of compliance required. I work my way through the W3C WCAG checklist - writing a report and recommendations for each Guideline. Adding screen shots and code examples as I go.