Re: Rockville, MD- Seeking low vision users for testing federal website

but if you read the message carefully, you will see that it is being
built to 508 specifications and that this only part of ensuring
accessibility/usability.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Kew" <nick@webthing.com>
To: <ghoshab@mail.nih.gov>
Cc: "wai-ig list" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 1:41 PM
Subject: Re: Rockville, MD- Seeking low vision users for testing federal
website



On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, David Poehlman wrote:

> Hello, my name is Abhijit Ghosh. I currently work at the National
Cancer
> Institute in the Communication Technologies Branch. As part of the 508
> initiative, we are looking to test our website with low vision to no
> vision users using JAWS, Window-Eyes, and in the future Screen
> magnifying software.

As others have mentioned, this is not the right approach to testing
website accessibility.  At best it tests one narrowly-defined aspect
of accessibility; at worst it risks reinforcing any bad practices
you may have - such as authoring to browser behaviour at the expense
of presenting the website contents clearly.

Both JAWS and Window-Eyes deal with one particular disability.
Both are themselves inaccessible to many users, by virtue of cost
and the prerequisites required to install them.

--
Nick Kew

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 2002 14:31:56 UTC