Don't rely on automated tools for checking web accessibility
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) released a report this week highlighting the poor accessibility of UK public websites.
Among other things, the report highlighted issues related to accessibility testing,
"It is very significant that the majority of those Checkpoints that this investigation found to be the most important are qualitative, in the sense that they require the exercise of human judgement. Automatic testing tools alone cannot, therefore, verify effective compliance." http://www.drc-gb.org/publicationsandreports/2.pdf
Of course this is not a revelation, web accessibility 'experts' have been saying this for some time, echoing the line taken by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), e.g., in the article, 'Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility', you will find the following statement,
"No single evaluation tool yet provides comprehensive information or captures all problems with regard to the accessibility of a site; therefore evaluation involves a combination of approaches." http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/
Your site will be accessible to a wider audience if you take a comprehensive approach; testing by people with different abilities and skills, and evaluation by individuals with knowledge related to accessible web design (that might be you) - or a combination of both. Evaluation website accessibility is an art not a science - it can't be reduce to running your site through Bobby and keeping your fingers crossed that everything will be ok.
John Myles | Sat Jan 06 2007