W3C WCAG tools?

[Jeremy]

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

--

jeremy

[David Dorward]

Jeremy wrote:

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

http://valet.webthing.com/access/url.html seems reasonable, but it should be
noted that accessibility is not something that can be easily measured by a
machine, many checkpoints need the human touch. No tool can currently[1]
replace a stong understanding of the issues involved.

[1] and won't until we develop really really good AIs.

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Jeremy]

In article <ci*******************@news.demon.co.uk>, David Dorward
says...

Jeremy wrote:

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

http://valet.webthing.com/access/url.html seems reasonable, but it should be
noted that accessibility is not something that can be easily measured by a
machine, many checkpoints need the human touch. No tool can currently[1]
replace a stong understanding of the issues involved.

[1] and won't until we develop really really good AIs.

Thanks - it is quite a useful checker and it does layout the results
nicely.

cheers

--

jeremy

[Chris Morris]

Jeremy <ne**********@hazelweb.co.uk> writes:

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...ibility/tools/
(should be) a fairly good list of 'automatic', semi-automatic and
manual tools.

Make sure you read http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/acctools.html
before using anything 'automatic'.

If I had to recommend *one* tool it'd be Opera 7. If I had to
recommend one *automatic* tool it'd be AccessValet for general purpose
or Vischeck for good quality semi-automatic checking.

What I'd *really* recommend is that you read around the accessibility
(and usability, and good authoring practice) literature and learn to
check things using only the power of your mind. Collected links
(desperately in need of categorisation, sorting, etc) at:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...ity/resources/

There's a quick accessibility tutorial at:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...lity/tutorial/
which you could practice using various tools on. It's no better than
any other generally inaccessible set of pages for this, except that
the answers are also available.

--
Chris

[Jeremy]

In article <87************@dinopsis.dur.ac.uk>, Chris Morris says...

Jeremy <ne**********@hazelweb.co.uk> writes:

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...ibility/tools/
(should be) a fairly good list of 'automatic', semi-automatic and
manual tools.

Make sure you read http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/acctools.html
before using anything 'automatic'.

If I had to recommend *one* tool it'd be Opera 7. If I had to
recommend one *automatic* tool it'd be AccessValet for general purpose
or Vischeck for good quality semi-automatic checking.

What I'd *really* recommend is that you read around the accessibility
(and usability, and good authoring practice) literature and learn to
check things using only the power of your mind. Collected links
(desperately in need of categorisation, sorting, etc) at:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...ity/resources/

There's a quick accessibility tutorial at:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...lity/tutorial/
which you could practice using various tools on. It's no better than
any other generally inaccessible set of pages for this, except that
the answers are also available.

Thanks for all this Chris, very helpful.
--

jeremy

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Chris Morris wrote:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/we...ibility/tools/
(should be) a fairly good list of 'automatic', semi-automatic and
manual tools.
That's a very valuable list and commentary. Thanks for pointing it
out. If you're the author (as I suspect you are), double thanks ;-)
Nitpick [1]. But, to more substantive issues:

Could I put in a good word for the "Web developer toolbar", for
Mozilla or Firefox.
http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/

I'd feel the need for a whole separate chapter on appropriate use of
MS Word (i.e via appropriately-named Styles). (The archives may show
that I've sketched it out myself on a couple of occasions, but I'm
sure someone who has more enthusiasm for dealing with MS Word could do
a better job on that topic).

Xenu link checker is very good at what it does: I use it myself, and
recommend it; but unfortunately it uses MSIE's web software for
actually retrieving resouces - which silently repairs some common
defects in URLs - so those faults never get as far as being assessed
by the Xenu checker.

You mention A-Prompt. Unless the situation has changed, that's a
long-since-completed project; the software contains quite a few
acknowledged bugs and shortcomings, but when I enquired, I was given
to understand that there are no resources to fix them. So I think I'd
put a bit of a caveat on any mention of it (unless you know better).
Make sure you read http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/acctools.html
before using anything 'automatic'.

Indeed.

cheers

[1] A routine gripe that the initial text size seemed a tad too small
compared to my configured default.

[Nick Kew]

In article <87************@dinopsis.dur.ac.uk>,
Chris Morris <c.********@durham.ac.uk> writes:

If I had to recommend *one* tool it'd be Opera 7. If I had to
recommend one *automatic* tool it'd be AccessValet for general purpose
or Vischeck for good quality semi-automatic checking.
Thanks for the plug (and David:-)

But I'm interested to see you describe AccessValet this way. It tends
to confirm what has long been evident - that people like it for the
fully automatic first level checking, but ignore the human-assisted
second level.

I have my own ideas as to why this is, but I wonder if I could take
this opportunity to get some feedback from users. What would induce
you to use and/or recommend AccessValet for human-assisted checking?
[snip lots of good advice]

--
Nick Kew

[Chris Morris]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> writes:

Xenu link checker is very good at what it does: I use it myself, and
recommend it; but unfortunately it uses MSIE's web software for
actually retrieving resouces - which silently repairs some common
defects in URLs - so those faults never get as far as being assessed
by the Xenu checker.

I'm assuming <a href='A link with spaces.html'> getting silently
corrected and similar?

--
Chris

[Chris Morris]

ni**@hugin.webthing.com (Nick Kew) writes:

But I'm interested to see you describe AccessValet this way. It tends
to confirm what has long been evident - that people like it for the
fully automatic first level checking, but ignore the human-assisted
second level.

I have my own ideas as to why this is, but I wonder if I could take
this opportunity to get some feedback from users. What would induce
you to use and/or recommend AccessValet for human-assisted checking?

I don't know - I tend to do almost all my checking manually nowadays.

I assume you mean pages like
http://valet.webthing.com/view=Asis/...G3&xslt=l2full

It does look good, but I prefer to check this sort of thing
manually. I will start recommending it to other people, though.

--
Chris

[jake]

In message <MP************************@news.individual.net> , Jeremy
<ne**********@hazelweb.co.uk> writes

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

You may want to have a look at this one:
http://wave.webaim.org/index.jsp

Excellent for a visual 'first pass'.

Then you can do a manual check -- assuming you've read and understood
the available literature (such as that at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html ).

That will get you to conform to 'standards' (e.g. WAI-AA, etc.) -- but
looking at a lot of the published literature will also tell you things
that aren't in any guidelines, but will make things easier for users of
Assistive Technology (AT).

regards.

regards.

--
Jake

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Chris Morris wrote:

I'm assuming <a href='A link with spaces.html'> getting silently
corrected and similar?

That sort of thing, yes. Try pointing Xenu at this hastily-assembled
example: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/oops.html

It says the link is OK - but look at it more closely.

[David Quinton]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 12:53:18 +0100, "Alan J. Flavell"
<fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

Could I put in a good word for the "Web developer toolbar", for
Mozilla or Firefox.
http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/

A new one on me!
Thanks. Highly recommended.
--
FREE phonecalls with other TalkTalk customers: <http://www.bizorg.co.uk/shopping/talktalk/>
Locate your Mobile phone: <http://www.bizorg.co.uk/news.html>

[Dave Patton]

David Quinton <us***************@REMOVETHISBITbizorg.co.uk> wrote in
news:06********************************@4ax.com:

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 12:53:18 +0100, "Alan J. Flavell"
<fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

Could I put in a good word for the "Web developer toolbar", for
Mozilla or Firefox.
http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/

A new one on me!
Thanks. Highly recommended.

I have four extensions loaded in Firefox, and I recommend all four:
- the DOM Inspector and the Web Developer extension:
http://users.bathspa.ac.uk/markhelp/...l_css_ref.html
- LiveHTTPHeaders:
http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/
- Google Pagerank extension:
http://www.tapouillo.com/firefox_extension/

--
Dave Patton
Canadian Coordinator, Degree Confluence Project
http://www.confluence.org/
My website: http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/

[Jeremy]

In article <Cx**************@gododdin.demon.co.uk>, jake says...

In message <MP************************@news.individual.net> , Jeremy
<ne**********@hazelweb.co.uk> writes

Hi, can anyone make any receommendations for a (free preferably!) tool
that will assess the conformace to accessibility standards?

You may want to have a look at this one:
http://wave.webaim.org/index.jsp

Excellent for a visual 'first pass'.

Then you can do a manual check -- assuming you've read and understood
the available literature (such as that at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html ).

That will get you to conform to 'standards' (e.g. WAI-AA, etc.) -- but
looking at a lot of the published literature will also tell you things
that aren't in any guidelines, but will make things easier for users of
Assistive Technology (AT).

Thanks for the link much appreciated.

--

jeremy