- From: Jamal Mazrui <Jamal.Mazrui@fcc.gov>
- Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 16:28:55 -0400
- To: "Wendy Chisholm" <wendy@w3.org>, "Joe Clark" <joeclark@joeclark.org>, "WAI-IG" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, "WAI-GL" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
I think the goal of automated testing, as much as possible, is an important one. To me, these results indicate that the success criteria and testing tools need to be improved, rather than the goal discounted. Regards, Jamal -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Wendy Chisholm Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 3:35 PM To: Joe Clark; WAI-IG; WAI-GL Subject: Re: Exploding the myth of automated accessibility checking At 03:13 PM 8/8/2005, Joe Clark wrote: >National treasure Gez Lemon wrote a test page with known validation and >WCAG errors and ran it through various automated checking tools, none of >which caught more than a few of the errors, if that. > ><http://juicystudio.com/article/invalid-content-accessibility-validator s.php> Excellent. This is an important point for people to understand. I evaluated a Web site last week that had 8 major accessibility issues but the evaluation tools only found 1 or 2 (depending on the tool). >It's quite a devastating analysis and calls into question the WCAG Working >Group's interest in making as many guidelines as possible machine-checkable. When the WCAG WG talks about testability, our primary goal is to provide enough information so that people who evaluate or create Web content can make a good decision. In WCAG 1.0, some of the checkpoints are ambiguous, so we're trying to fix that in WCAG 2.0 by providing as much testable information as possible. By specifying that success criteria must be "testable" we are not saying that success criteria are machine automatable. We are saying that a person should be able to determine if they have satisfied a given criteria. Most of the "tests" (in the test suite) are procedures for humans to follow, not algorithms for tools. If tests are automatable, that's great, however I don't think anyone expects that all tests (or even a majority) will be fully automated. Shawn Henry wrote a great piece about this a while ago "Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools Need People" [1]. The 30 June 2005 Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 says, "The Working Group believes that all success criteria should be testable. Tests can be done by computer programs or by people who understand this document. When multiple people who understand WCAG 2.0 test the same content using the same success criteria, the same results should be obtained." This could probably use some work, but I hope that it's clear that we understand humans are part of the evaluation process and that our primary goal is to provide unambiguous success criteria. Best, --wendy [1] <http://uiaccess.com/evaltools.html>
Received on Monday, 8 August 2005 20:29:28 UTC