- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 04:02:25 +1100
- To: tina@elfi.org
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hi Shiela, I agree with Tina that there are no tools that can do the whole job for you. If you are serious about wanting to keep accessibility as good as possible, I would suggest that you become as familiar as possible with W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG - http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10 - in my opinion the best available single reference, although there are others), and then look for tools that you find helpful. Having worked on WCAG since the first W3C draft I rely on having a lot of it in memory, and on using the checklist as a reminder when I am verifying my work. In my experience the best tools are ones which allow you to monitor a whole site in development, and most of them are commercial. Of the free tools available I have found the Wave and el TAW (in Spanish) suit my personal preferences and working style. I would prefer tools that integrate with my authoring environment better, but I have a weird authoring process so have to think a bit harder. There are a number of tools that integrate with commercial web authoring software - in any event my advice is to, look for something that suits you, and interpret its results in light of your own knowledge and what you learn. There is a list of tools for evaluation and repair, both commercial and free, that is more or less maintained by W3C, at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools - I suggest looking there every so often for changes. This is a field with fairly significant development happening, so your choice today may not be the one you would make in a year, or would have made a year ago. Cheers Charles On Saturday, Feb 22, 2003, at 03:16 Australia/Melbourne, tina@elfi.org wrote: > First of all I > think we need to get a few concepts out of the way, namely that of > "Validation". > > Typically that word refer to checking the HTML code for syntax > errors, > which is a straightforward matter for http://validator.w3.org/ - as > you > are probably aware, making sure documents are syntactically correct is > a WCAG checkpoint though sadly a priority 2. > > What you seem to be looking for is a way to validate the > *accessibility* of a website. This is a far harder task. There are no > automated processes which can test for all aspects of accessibility. -- Charles McCathieNevile charles@sidar.org Fundación SIDAR http://www.sidar.org
Received on Friday, 21 February 2003 12:02:12 UTC