RE: the WAVE accessibility evaluator

[I didn't copy the whole IG list on this, preferring the ER IG.  You can
fix that if you think it is an error.  - Al]

At 01:01 PM 2000-03-17 -0500, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>Also, Bruce...
>
>You mentioned about administrators.  Right now, as you say, the philosophy 
>of the WAVE is close interaction with the human users.  However, once I've 
>gone through the work of parsing and detecting various conditions, it would 
>be simple to output statistics if that's what you had in mind.  E.g. for 
>images, total number, total without ALT text, total with suspicious ALT 
>text, and the rest... which need human perusal.
>

AG::

One of the roles of the webmaster is quality control over submissions from
contributors to the site.  I would not necessarily leap to the idea that
utility for administrators of sites is predicated on having statistical
reports.  

Administrators in fact are superusers of critic tools.  They understand
what the tool is talking about better than the scattered contributors do.
Often it takes the originating author a.k.a. contributor to make repairs,
but the administrator is constantly having to make rapid decisions about
when to just post a contribution, when to repair it in the webmaster shop
because the repairs are minor and obvious, and when to sent the whole thing
back for further work because the flaws are endemic and serious.  This tool
which speeds up the process of making the _absolutely critical_ manual
checks in that decision process make the tool a strong candidate for
administrator use.  Furthermore, it doesn't have to attain the same
standard of usability for administrators to use it as it does for
contributors to use it <grin>.

Or at least that is a scenario that Bruce's comments triggered in my head.

Al

>Those kinds of overview statistics might also make it more useful to users 
>who are blind, another thing I want to do.
>
>What sorts of things would you like to see?  And what format?  HTML tables, 
>"spreadsheet" files, etc?  Not that I'm promising a completion date (grin).
>
>Len
>-------
>Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
>Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
>Department of Electrical Engineering
>Temple University
>423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122
>
>kasday@acm.org
>http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday
>
>(215) 204-2247 (voice)
>(800) 750-7428 (TTY)
>

Received on Friday, 17 March 2000 13:49:11 UTC