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Cynthia Says is a web-based program that allows individuals to test web pages for accessibility.
It is free software that is available online at cynthiasays.com.
The site is very simple to use.
You simply enter the URL of the page you would like to test.
For example, we might want to point our high school students to the Internet Public Library's
page
designed to help teens with their research and writing projects.
But we want to ensure that it's an accessible site.
For example, can screen readers recognize the text in these images?
Cynthia Says is designed to check the page, given its URL.
So we'll copy the URL for use on the Cynthia Says website.
It can determine whether the page satisfies a number of different web accessibility standards.
One set of standards it checks is that given in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
An easy checklist of these standards is provided by WebAIM,
a site that provides information on web accessibility at webaim.org.
Section 508 specifies the following standards for web pages
to allow individuals with disabilities equal access to web-based information.
A few of these standards I'll talk about just briefly. For example:
(a) appropriate text equivalents or alt tags should be given for non-text elements on a
website
(b) any multimedia elements should contain captions
(d) documents should be readable without an associated style sheet
(e) any image maps on a page should be associated with redundant text links
(g) rows and column headers in tables should be identified as such
A number of standards among the 508 Standards are in place
so that web pages can be read in a logical way by a screen reader
for the benefit of individuals with vision impairments, for example.
One of the standards also specifies that a text-only page equivalent of the web page
should be provided if any of the other standards can not be met
Okay, so let's test our resource page for our high school students against the Section
508 Standards.
We're just going to put the URL in the box.
We can include a number of additional reports in addition to the basic report which checks
each of the standards against the web site,
but most of these are really useful only for developers.
For example, the "Alternative Text Quality Report" provides information about the quality
of the alt tags on the website,
and "Include file source on accessibility failures" basically shows you
where in the html source code any failure that occurs is.
So, we can include those just to show you what they look like.
So, let's test the site.
Okay. The results show whether the web page satisfies each of the standards in the "Verification
Checklist," here.
You can see that this page passes the tests, or they weren't applicable
because the features tested do not appear on the webpage
(for example, there weren't multimedia elements on the web page so this test wasn't applicant;
there weren't tables so it didn't check for row and column headers, and that sort of thing).
The page did have all of the alt tags for all of the images on the page, which is great.
If we scroll down a little bit, I told you that we might also want to include an Alt
Text Quality Report,
and you can see some of the suggestions for what makes a good or a bad alt tag for images.
And one of the things that was flagged for this page was that there was an alt tag that
was too short,
shorter than the recommended 7 to 81 characters in length.
And after looking at the code, which I did earlier,
the image that's being flagged here is this image, "A+," and the alt tag is just, in fact,
"A plus."
So, in that case, the short alt tag is just fine and informative,
regardless of the fact that it's short, shorter than 7 characters long.
So, this is the basic report that matches Section 508 standards to the Internet Public
Library's web site referred to earlier.
Cynthia Says is also able to test the page for a different set of standards: the World
Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) web accessibility standards.
These can be found on the W3C web site.
The W3C assigns each standard with a priority level, and those assigned priority 1 must
be satisfied.
Standards assigned priority 2 and 3 have a lesser impact on accessibility.
W3C provides a small set of guidelines and a number of checkpoints to ensure that the
guideline is met.
Checkpoints at priority level 1 are indicated in red.
You can see, just scrolling through the guidelines, that a number of them are consistent with
the standards described in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
We have guidelines for example, on providing text alternatives,
on creating tables that "transform gracefully," and things like that.
But we also have some unique guidelines.
For example, Guideline 4 dealing with proper use of language and Guideline 9 dealing with
designing a site so that it is device-independent.
These are guidelines unique to W3C.
We can test the A+ Research & Writing page again against the W3C guidelines as well.
All we have to do is change the "Accessibility Report Mode"
and you can see that we can exclusively test Priority 1 checkpoints, or we can test all
three, or just 1 and 2.
If we do 1, 2, and 3, you can specify that the site shouldn't fail if there are priority
2 and 3 errors but they will flag those as errors.
So we can run the test again.
And, again, we get a report that lists the guidelines/checkpoints on the left and whether
it passes that standard or not.
And you can see again a very similar report for the site using these guidelines.
These are the Priority 1 guidelines, and then Priority 2 and 3 are below.
You can see that rather than saying a "No" for items that did not pass Priority 2 and
3 checkpoints, it gives us a warning instead.
So, you can see that Cynthia Says can be a useful tool to help you determine whether
a web page that you want to recommend to your students meets some basic accessibility requirements.