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good afternoon, my name is Glenda Sims and i'm here to present
on practical accessibility testing for enterprise web sited
let me introduce myself a little bit better
I'm glenda the goodwitch sims
i'm a senior accessibility consultant at Deque where I get to share my passion and expertise for the
open web
with .gov .edu and companies ranging from small business
to fortune five hundred
i'm also an accessibility consultant judge and trainer for the non-profit Knowbility
i give back to the web by volunteering on the web standards project
oh, and I did spend over a decade as the accessibility expert and advocate at the university of texas
at austin
let me tell you the story
of what it was like being the accessibility expert at the university of texas at austin
UT is a very large university
with fifty thousand students and twenty thousand employees
we had over a million web pages
extremely distributed web environment
I often described it as separate kingdoms
where each college, like the college of engineering, the college of liberal arts, the college of natural
sciences
where each college at UT had it's own king,
the dean,
and each college had it's own web site
and it's own webmaster
and none of these webmasters reported to me
in fact there were over a thousand webmasters on campus
talk about an incredible challenge
but i'll be on honest with you, i'm a girl that loves a big challenge and i also saw this as
an awesome opportunity!
what gave me the energy to be so optimistic about improving accessibility at the university
of texas? well i wasn't alone
in fact i had two internationally known accessibility experts at my side
dr john slatin and sharron rush
when i first met john he was a professor at ut
who lost his vision due to retinal disease
instead of letting his disability limit him, he became an accessibility expert
opened the accessibility research institute at the university and for a short time even
served as co-chair of the WCAG 2.0 working group
before his untimely death in 2008.
I also had Sharron, Rush, executive director of Knowbility, at my side
her non-profit is dedicated to barrier free IT
and she is a well-known accessibility expert and a tireless advocate for accessibility
so
in the summer of 2002 we set about trying to figure out how to make the university
of texas more accessible
we begin with a manual test of the UT home page and every link off the home page for
accessibility
so we tested about a 114 pages
the first test revealed that fewer than forty percent of the pages we tested were accessible
our next step
was to fix all of those accessibility errors on any page that, we, the central web team,
controlled
then we contacted each of the owners of the other pages and offered them training, consulting,
and motivation to fix the errors on their own web pages.
by the fall of 2002 we had already raised test scores on this limited set of pages
to 90% accessible
and by the spring of 2003 we reached 98%
yes, this was only the home pages of these top-level sites
but it was a good start
while the manual testing is useful, there is no way for a large enterprise to manually
test everything
we have to use accessibility testing tools wisely
i think of accessibility testing tools as coming in three flavors
firt, tools that we use to test pages one by one
such as standards validators
second, accessibility authoring tools that help monitor accessibility as content is being
created and published to the web
and third
enterprise accessibility reports
so let's look at these a little closer
the accessibility validators page by page are often free tools
here I've listed a number of them that are commonly used
from the W3C's
css/html validators
to Worldspace and FireEyes by Deque
to the WAVE by WebAim
web developer for firefox
acceptability toolbar for IE
luminosity contrast ratio analyzer from gez lemon
all of these tools are useful in the page by page accessibility validation process
as much as we like to use testing tools
it still requires human brain
to do the complete testing
another critical step in testing is with actual assistive technology, for example I often test
representative pages with JAWS, a screen reader,
to see what problems actually occur
but it wasn't until i finally got my hands on enterprise level accessibility testing
tools that i felt
that i was making progress
it was then
that I felt like I just had the accessibility super friends join forces with me
enterprise tools
let you define accessibility scans by URL
and select your testing criteria
do you want to use WCAG
2.0 Level A or do you want to go to
level AA
or level AAA
and they needed to run these reports on a regular basis. i've found monthly to be the
most useful
and i can see reports of progress over time
the power and this kind of a dashboard
is enormous
here is an example of fictitious university using the worldspace
enterprise testing tool
imagine being able to see which of your web properties are doing well
which ones are doing poorly, to be able to see what types of errors occur most frequently
having an enterprise accessibility testing tool at UT Austin made all the difference in the
world
now i could see what was going on
and could motivate areas at UT to improve their scores
and see who needed the most help
in fact
when i set up a similar dashboard at the university
i set it up so that as each webmaster logged in they didn't just see their scores they saw everyone
else's scores and how they rated
it was an intrinsic motivator
you also need to empower all of your web developers with a desktop accessibility testing tool
they can see exactly where the problems are with the press of a button as the are developing
pages
FireEyes is a wonderful desktop testing tool that is free from Deque
here is a screenshot of the FireEyes testing pluggin in Firefox
it is a plugin that works with firebug
in this screenshot
I'm in Firefox
and have pulled up the home page of hawaii.gov
I've openned the FireEyes plugin within the browser
and clicked on the setting tab
in the setting tab, I simply selected what i wanted to test against WCAG
2.0 AA
I could have picked any standard and gone down another level and even selected individual success
criteria
but for this test i want to go WCAG 2.0 AA everything
then you simply run the test by pulling up any web page in your browser and clicking the now
button to have
FireEyes
test against that standard for you in this case WCAG 2.0 AA
in this screenshot, if you got up and looked really closely at the screen you'd see that there are
69 issues being reported on this page
it is that line highlighted in yellow
and you can also see the first error
listed is an image is missing a text equivalent
if we look a little deeper to the far right of each of these errors
in FireEyes is a button labeled details
when i press the details button I get a full explanation of the error
including the source code for the error
and the standard associated with this particular error
so for the first issue of images missing a text equivalent
we can see in the details window
that this error is associated with WCAG 2.0 level A success criteria 1.1.1
if we scroll down further in this detail window
we would see an explanation of what a text equivalent is how to remediate the issue
and even a code sample
another nice feature in FireEyes is the ability to highlight where this error is occurring on
the web page in the graphical browser display
this helps a sighted developer see
where the issue is on the page in a visual context
by the way
FireEyes is accessible for people with disabilities as well
while this particular feature might not prove helpful to a developer with visual disabilities
they would be able to access all the features I am showing you
now the next feature I'm going to show you is really dreamy
if we just click on the inspect button for this particular error we are taken right
to the line of code in firebug where the issue is occurring
let's see what that looks like
being able to see the actual code that is causing the error in the context within the
rest of the source code for this page within FireBug
is priceless
especially for the developer who now needs to go fix that error
as valuable as these enterprise level accessibility testing tools are
whether it's the Worldspace dashboard
or the free FireEyes plugin
nothing ever replaces actually user testing
I always recommend usability testing of representative pages of the site
with actual people who have disabilities
my favorite reference on the subject is just "Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design"
by Shawn Lawton Henry
many of you may already be aware of this wonderful book
and the fact that the entire book is also available for free online is totally awesome
Way to go, Shawn!
So when it gets right down to it, I believe
you must use a multi-tiered accessibility testing plan
i start with code validation manual browser testing then I run online accessibility testing
tools like by FireEyes on representative pages
this gives me a sense of what's going on with a given site
next I pull out assistive technology
like a screen reader to see what barriers i encounter
and while i'm doing this manual testing I have an enterprise accessibility report like WorldSpace
running in the background
and i'm the kind of girl who really likes to run the enterprise scan across the whole site
because
I do not want to be fooled by a site that might be clean on the first few levels but full of accessibility
problems in the lower level pages
so running an enterprise scans
is a bit like having eyes in the back of my head
and last
but certainly not least
i conduct hands on accessibility testing
because i don't think that a site is accessible until I see that it can be used as effectively
by a person with a disability
as by a person without a disability
I'll ended by saying that accessibility testing is a critical ingredient in building accessible
web sites
but the only to have truly accessible web development is to begin with accessibility
in mind
no matter what software development life cycle you use, whether it is agile or waterfall
you have to plan for accessibility at the design phase
you have to equip and empower your team
for accessible development at the code phase
you have to test and remediate for accessibility at the quality assurance phase
and continuously monitor for accessibility after launch
with does this mean
in the way of enterprise testing
during the design phase you need to set your accessibility testing standards
during the coding phase
you better make sure your developers and content contributors
have the tools they need to test as they create
during the test
phase, of course, your quality assurance testers must have accessibility testing tools to check
to make sure that everything is on target
and don't assume that just because it was accessible at launch that it stays that way
enterprise scans
are going to give you the ability to test
over time
once a month on a regular basis
and discover when accessibility falls off the table on any given website