- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:00:58 +0100
- To: "Nissen, Dan E" <Dan.Nissen@unisys.com>, "wai-ig list" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 10:03:56 -0600, Nissen, Dan E <Dan.Nissen@UNISYS.com> wrote: > ... the last time I tried to get a comprehensive response > together on how to comply with the stated objectives of the members of > this list, I came up with 8 separate environments that needed to be > separately tested for usability, > > A text only site would presumably meet all the objectives of this group As a member of this list I have to state that a text only site would not meet my objectives in providing accessibility in general. It is something that can enhance accessibility for a small group of people with specific disabilities, if done right, but I generally consider that this involves more work than just making the original version work for those people... > ... So, the investment to get > to where this group would be happy is: > 1. A text only site tested in Firefox on 3 or more platforms Windows, Mac OS X, some flavour of Unix - for example. (At sidar we also test on Mac OS 9 using the screen reader OutSpoken, which is what people have until VoiceOVer comes out with the next version of OS X, but I am not sure if our tester uses Firefox). > 2. A text only site tested on Internet Explorer on several versions of > IE Which ones? Do you need to test across different versions of Windows? It depends where you are perhaps - for South America I would suggest that you really need to go as far back as Windows 95, and in general 98 (although I believe it is no longer supported, it is still used Still, I would skip the text-only site, so this means the comments apply below... > 3. The main site that works with both IE and Firefox for non-disabled > persons to meet the image needs > 4. Test one of these on Macintosh under probably 3 browsers I would use Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera > 5. Test under Opera in combination with several OSs I do this for Symbian (a common mobile phone platform), Mac OS X, Windows, and another Unix. > 6. Test under Lynx on Linux and Windows I use Lynx extensively on Macintosh. But I have not noticed that it varies at all across platforms, and I would be confident testing it on my main platform (by chance for me that is usually OS X. Only thing to watch for is what versions are available across platforms - for Mac OS 9 in particular it tends to be an older one). So I get something like the following for a full testing setup: Windows 98, XP: Opera, Firefox (latest full release version) IE 5, 6 Mac OS X Safari, Opera, Firefox (latest full release version) IE 5.5 Unix running X (Gnome and KDE for full points) Mozilla (which is not quite the same as Firefox - particularly with regard to accessibility options), Konqueror, Opera Mobile platform Opera, "default browser" (depends on your platform - ideally you'd at least do WinCE with IE and Symbian). OS of choice Lynx (latest version, latest version available across all platforms) This is 20 testing setups, although you can run them all with a high-spec Mac running VirtualPC and a Linux installation, plus a couple of mobile devices. > Each test might require over 100 different web pages be tested for a > typical banking application. True, but the basic testing to be done is in the order of a few hours per setup and a couple of days of analysis to design sensible testing patterns in the first place. If the test setup is well designed it should be possible to use a lot of results from early tests that you know will apply for later tests - for example alt-text behaviour can be predicted across almost all browsers without needing to test it 20 times, CSS testing can be done in parallel with other stuff, and so on. In my experience the hardest things are javascript (because it is so often badly written in the first place), layout (because it is relatively inconsistent across platforms and people try to do stuff that is unreliable), testing with assistive technologies that use non-standard system access methods to improve performance, and testing badly-designed sites (which throw up more problems so take longer to get through). > This kind of investment is significant to > the banks, etc. who need to absorb all this to get a fraction of their > clients going. Hmmm. Setting up the infrastructure to do this costs something (mostly in terms of adjusting workflow and management processes). The ongoing costs are also non-zero. But my experience is that they are not massive in terms of a typical large-scale banking system. As frames of reference I am using things like + the decision by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunies Commission that providing TTY devices is a "reasonably" (in the Australian legal sense, applicable across the kind of places most of us live in) cheap thing for telcos to accommodate the proportion of their clients who need them, + the cost of providing physical access to banking facilities, + what amounts to an educated guess at the size of the "fraction of clients" we are talking about, + what I know of the overall costs of such projects, + an assumption of ongoing commitment to accessibility... > Yes, it is a "right" to have access, but it is not clear > exactly how much of this is required to provide the rights. True. In my experience it is not clear to anyone what the actual usage patterns are, let alone who is being excluded and therefore leaves no readily visible information. Developing a methodology that accurately quantifies how much stuff is "needed" is a very difficult job. Like developing text-only sites, I think that to a large extent better returns can be made on doing simple qualitative analysis to identify potential problems, then fix them. > And, I'm sure I can find a lot of people who would assert that Linux is > only cheaper if your time is very inexpensive. I'm sure we could have this argument for 3 years and not reach a consensus :-). Note that the price of people's time versus productn costs varies enormously in a global context, changing a working environment almost always costs something, and I don't think that investing in this argument is an effective way to achieve accessibility either :-) > We need good standards that allow us to not have to do all of this > testing and building of separate solutions, and we need to work hard on > the vendors of browsers to do the needed work to make them compatible. Indeed. As noted above and elsewhere, we also need expertise in using what is available. Cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile - Vice Presidente - Fundacion Sidar charles@sidar.org http://www.sidar.org (chaals is available for consulting at the moment)
Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2005 12:08:23 UTC