Access Keys Awards
Explanation of Awards
Accessibility is a very broad term attempting to combine the needs of every user into one single idea. However, trying to provide accessibility to every person who might use your website is far more complex than adding a few simple access key shortcuts or providing a text-only alternative.
Users who require text-to-speech software to access the internet have very different needs from users for whom English is a second language. They also have very different needs from users who have trouble reading from a computer monitor or who like to enlarge the text on their screens. A site which does not have correct alt text on its images may be perfectly accessible to deaf users, people with short-term memory problems or those surfing with one-button access but will make little sense to blind users. Alternatively a site built for everyone but written using very technical language with few descriptive graphics could be accessible to users of screen readers but will be very difficult to understand for children and teenagers or people who find visual information easier to grasp than text.
We have identified five types of user groups - each with slightly different needs - and have built the Access Keys awards scheme around these groups. Each listing in the directory will indicate how accessible a site is to each group.
Categories of Award
Access Keys offers six different awards based on how accessible a website is to people using assistive technologies or with specific design needs. These awards or Keys are for sites that:
- Are accessible on a basic level to users who do not need assistive technologies to access the internet (Accessibility Awareness Access Key - Spider Only Award).
- Are accessible to users using text-to-speech software (Text-to-Speech Access Key).
- Are accessible to users using screen magnification software (Magnifiable Access Key).
- Are accessible to users surfing without a mouse and/or who may have a physical impairment and/or who may be using an assistive technology (Keyboard Access Key).
- Use the clearest and simplest language possible so as not to confuse visitors (Easy Read Access Key).
- Allow the user to disable styles and set their own styles via their browser and are designed with usability in mind (Easy View Access Key).
Accessibility Awareness is an automated check that tests for readability and the ability of the user to modify his or her settings. The other five awards are based on a paid manual assessment and recognise higher levels of access to various user groups.
These five categories were designed to encapsulate the different types of assistive technologies used to assist in accessing the internet. They also cover those aspects of web page design which can cause the most confusion and frustration to internet users of all abilities and levels of experience. Sites should strive to achieve full awards in all five categories in order to ensure they are accessible to as many users as possible. Sites which pass manual checks for all five categories will be awarded a special Universal Access Key.
Each criterion has been matched to the award category (or categories) to which it applies. A site meeting the required criteria for an award then receives that award.
Read more about why accessibility is good for business.
Access Keys Criteria
Using the WAI criteria in both WCAG 1.0 and the working draft of WCAG 2.0 we set up our own checklist. Recognising businesses may need to balance the concept of accessible design with commercial needs such as SEO, the requirements of advertising partners or the limitations of non-standards compliant CMS software means we have based our checklist around what we feel are real world standards. Sites can potentially meet all of WCAG and not be wholly accessible in the same way that sites can fail WCAG and be accessible to most users.
Read more about the Access Keys accessibility criteria.
How We Grant Awards
Sites submit a URL to Access Keys. Our accessibility spider will then look at the HTML on that page and will follow all the on-site links from that page and check the target pages as well. The spider can determine certain basic things about the accessibility of a site based on that site's HTML/XHTML code. The spider can also indicate sections of a webpage that may have accessibility issues and need to be checked by a human.
The spider generates a report showing which checkpoints a site has passed and an overall percentage score which indicates whether a site has received an Accessibility Awareness Access Key. Sites submitted for just the spider's report that have been granted an award will then be notified and added to the directory.
Webmasters should be aware that while automated testing can check if a site meets specific requirements related to the code of their pages it cannot tell if these requirements have been implemented in a useful way. For example, the spider can look for alt text on images but cannot decide if the alt text is helpful or if it correctly describes the image. Therefore, it is advisable to upgrade to manual testing to make certain your site meets the highest level of accessibility.
Sites which have requested a manual check will then be assessed by a member of the Access Keys staff page by page for compliance with each checkpoint. At the end the score is calculated and a report is generated to indicate any manually checked Access Keys which have been awarded. Sites will then be notified of their awards and added to the directory.
Occasionally you will find a site in the directory which has no awards. The reason for this is that although a site may fail our checks, our checks are based on WCAG and are very much about coding pages using Web Standards compliant design. Sometimes a site may not have standards compliant code but will be accessible using only a keyboard and will make perfect sense when navigating using text-to-speech software. In these instances, we would recommend to the site owner that they update their site to use CSS and web standards as it will make their site forward compatible and may make it easier for users with disabilities by reducing the time it takes to complete an action or find the information they need. We recognise, however, that ultimately if any user can navigate through a site, use the site for its intended purpose and understand the content then it is an accessible site.
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