Re: Testing web page accessibility by phone

And people do and say the darnedest things as well as babies but the
fact remains that it is still quite possible to validate for speck
including accessibility and get a long way towards the goal.  People who
I have worked with who use the phone to look stuff up have been doing it
for years and Ican do this too.  It goes like this:
Person speaks to recipiant of request.  recipiant of request answers and
then looks up info.  then responds with info.  and so on.  When I test
web pages, I test web pages.  I can use a set of predetermined questions
if you like but unless you have me look at the pages and take notes
before we have our little chat, what you get out of me and most I fear
is worthless for many reasons including the dichotomy of processes
envolved.

----- Original Message -----
From: "phoenixl" <phoenixl@sonic.net>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 9:52 PM
Subject: Re: Testing web page accessibility by phone



Hi,

Web developers, like programmers, can do the darndest things.
Programmers
can write code which will be syntactically correct and take ten times
longer to run than needed.  Or they can write syntactically correct code
which is near unintelligble to other human beings, but syntax checkers
can have a hard time determining that it isn't readily understandable.

You should see some of the HTML that students can write which will
validate
but creates awful web pages.

Scott

PS  A number of blind people that we've tested have pretty easily
tested web pages while on the phone.  It often is not that dissimilar
from being on the phone with a customer and needing to look up
information to give them using a screen reader.  But like any
methodology,
there are probably some people the methodology may not be approrpriate
for.

> the kind of validation I am referring to here is inclusive and begins
> with what is usually thought of as validation.  It goes like this.
> Write your pages to speck, validate the pages to make sure they are
> written to speck and while you are writing to speck, include in the
> speck known factors that make pages usable/accessible and when you
> validate the final product, use tools that will check for known
> usability and accessibility factors and also that will allow you to
> examine other issues that may be relevant.
>
> People are important in the mix too but it all starts with a well laid
> plan and when the users finally test the pages, they should find
> insugnificant things that you may have missed or hadn't thought of but
> that wound not necessarily break the accessibility/usability of the
> pages.  I cannot talk on the phone and test a web page at the same
time.

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2002 08:11:26 UTC