RE: Best automated Accessibility evaluation tool

> Julian Scarlett

> http://juicystudio.com/article/invalid-content-accessibility-validators.php

> (Haven't yet tried it with Gez's tests in the 
> above link.)

Just gave TAW3 standalone version a whirl on that page.
It flagged up 2 priority 3 errors for

5.6 Provide abbreviations for header labels

relating to 

<th scope="col">Structural Markup</th>
<th scope="col">Accessible Tables</th>

because the headers are longer than 15 characters - fair enough, though a
bit arbitrary...I would have said they should have been marked as
requiring human testing.

Also, 2 priority 3 errors for 

10.4 Until user agents handlge empty controls correctly, include default,
place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas.

relating to the fact that the two selects

<select id="town" name="town">

and

<select id="sectown" name="sectown">

don't have at least one OPTION selected. Now that's a novel interpretation
of 10.4...particularly since the wording of the checkpoint itself only
mentions edit boxes and text areas, not selects...so this is a false negative
in my opinion.

Apart from that, lots of priority 1 and 2 issues marked for human review
(29 and 50, respectively).
Still, considering the tool is completely free, it's not too bad...with the usual
caveat that automated testing is not a panacea and that one needs to be able to
perform the manual checks as well as making damned sure that there are no false
positives or false negatives.

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Web Editor / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk
________________________________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
________________________________

Received on Monday, 21 November 2005 11:50:11 UTC