Re: Manual validation

After reading the responses (and in particular the
sections quoted below), letting the message contents
playing in my head for sometime, and rereading the
responces again, the following came to me:

Creating an good acessible website to have the largest
group of people benefit from it involves:
  a) Thought about: the layout, structure, navigation,
     and the way to present the information.
  b) Create a semantic rich template on wich _ALL_ pages
     of the website will be based.
  c) Fill in the information using the above temple and
     structure, using rich semantics for the contents
  d) Create additional stylesheet to deal with the layout
     of the information to get it displayed nice.
  e) Try if you (and any other people involed) can get
     the information out in an as easy as possible way.
  f) Check with as many accessibility tools available
     if you didn't overlook something.
  g) Let a few groups (say visual impaired and blind
     people, people with cognitive trouble, elderly
     and people who don't have the websites language
     as their primary language) of people test the
     site.
  h) Try to get continues evaluation through feedback
  i) With every update recheck with the tools

Also it might by a good third party service, for
people having difficulties with the accessibility
of any website, to monitor the web and give active
feedback to websites authors / owners about the
issues involved with their website. And maybe even
provide public statistics of the most accessible
website and the worst accessible websites out there.

This could enlarge the general knowledge about
accessibility, and a stimulus to authors to take
their accessibility with higher priority to prevent
being mentioned in the statistics.

I'm unaware of such a service. I personally have
send a few emails to the companies of websites I
find unusable in the past. Sometimes a get a good
reaction, sometimes a *fuck you*, but mostly no
reaction at all.

If such a service is not already there, and people
find that it would be a nice to have, I would be willing
to host and maintain it on the IRADIS Foundation servers.

> >> There are two issues here. One is the need for manual
> >> validation, and the other who should do it.
> >
> > And the third is what resources are available to do it.
> > If you have a blind person, do you equip them with
> > expensive top-of-the-range kit that can do things like
> > "accessible" flash, or something affordable to real-life
> > users?
>
>  Good point. If you do ask a blind person to assess what
>  they can get out of the content, how are they going to
>  know what they missed out on?

> >> People with disabilities are likely to understand
> >> specific issues better than those without.
> >
> > This is true, particularly where you are presenting
> > complex information. But those of us who don't have
> > representatives from a broad range of disability
> > groups amongst our colleagues have to make do with
> > second-best.
>
>  And I agree that accepting feedback is always a valuable
>  and important part of ongoing accessibility. From the
>  authoring / updating side it is equally important to
>  document the process required, so an update doesn't make
>  a page become less accessible.


Christian Bottelier
Secretary & Project Manager
IRADIS Foundation

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 14:40:17 UTC