Accessibility Awareness Access Key

The Accessibility Awareness Key is for sites passing our automated testing. The spider can check for some basic accessibility and usability issues - which will mean a site is readable to people of a lower reading age or for whom English is a second language.

Designing for Readability and Usability

You should style your pages so that users can enlarge fonts or make them smaller by using no fixed font sizes or column sizes. You should also separate structure from presentation. Doing all of these things means the site meets basic readability requirements. Users can, if you meet these criteria, to some extent, create their own settings to make your pages easier to read. You should also try to write as clearly and simply as possible and avoid using deprecated tags.

A Note on Automated Testing

Automated accessibility testing can only look for specific things in the code of a web page that it has been designed to see. We can find, using an automated check, validation issues, serious errors in the code of a web page, deprecated elements which might cause problems for some users and problems which can be mathematically tested such as contrast between foreground and background colours and the difficulty of the text on a page using a formula to calculate readability. We can also check for code which indicates the use of scripts which may cause problems for some users and the use of a noscript tag.

Many of these elements should be used as warnings only in order to look further at the content and design of a web page. For example, while our spider may find that your site has provided alternate text for every image, it may be that this alternate text is not useful to people using a screen reader or that a description such as “spacer” has been assigned to decorative elements rather than null alt text. It is also possible that a site failing an automated check will pass manual checks because while it doesn’t meet the letter of the law it is accessible in the real world. For example, a site using a DTD of XHTML 1.0 Strict may fail a validation check but changing the DTD to XHTML 1.0 Transitional would mean it would pass.

As a result, these tests are not infallible and site owners should always study the reports they receive about their site to locate problem areas and to find ways to improve the accessibility of their site. If your site does not pass the automated testing, it is always advisable to submit your site for manual testing which is far more nuanced and involves detailed checking of your code as well as testing of your site using a screen reader and without a mouse.

We are currently developing improved auditing software to make accessibility testing much easier Please chack back soon.

Accessibility Awareness Checkpoints