Re: New tools for checking accessibility of dynamically generated web resources available

On 12/15/06, Jon Gunderson <jongund@uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
>
> New version of the Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) and the
> Firefox Accessibility Extension are now available.


Jon,

This is generally a great looking tool. It's intuitive, and provides a lot
of useful information. I'm curious, though, about the results I got from FAE
regarding document titles and h1 elements.

Why am I getting good scores for having fewer than three first-level
headings ("Pass: The page contains at least one and no more than two
h1elements")? Agreed that lots and lots of headings could make a page
seem
cluttered, and could have and effect on page load time (but we're talking
text here, so it's probably negligible), but certainly there are instances
where having many h1 sections might be reasonable. On a long document
intended for printing to be read off-line, for example.

It also brings up the issue of title/h1 redundancy ("Pass: The text content
of each h1 element matches all or part of the title content"). I'll probably
get criticized for this, but I've on occasion used an h1 containing the
string "Main content," and then used image replacement to replace the header
with a graphic reflecting the document title. My reasoning is that  sighted
users won't necessarily pay attention to the document title, but will be
able to deduce where the main content is from its position on the page.
Non-sighted users, on the other hand, are much more likely to have paid
attention to the document title, but would benefit from an explicitly
labeled content section. I'd be curious as to your thoughts (or anyone
else's).

Neither of those issues seem to be covered in the WAG (or at least I found
nothing in my search).

And one more thing slightly OT: What's up with all the Javascript new window
links?

Best,

Chris