Comments on Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility

Hello-

On behalf of SSB Technologies, I wanted to provide some feedback on the
draft of the "Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility" document being
produced by the WAI.  I apologize that these comments are a couple days
late, but I hope that they will still prove helpful.

Overall, the draft is an excellent start.  My primary suggestion is to
improve the usability of the document in two ways: more context and
providing a printable checklist.

Providing more context about the importance of accessibility, and the
importance of checking web sites for accessibility will help to make the
document more understandable by people not familiar with accessibility
issues.  It is very possible that this is the only WAI document some people
may see, and it is therefore important to give them some background on the
issue (for example, a project manager may give the document to a web
developer without any other context).  Adding a paragraph to the
Introduction about why they should check pages for accessibility would
address this problem.

The second improvement is to provide a printable checklist for each type of
analysis.  This would allow a user to print out the checklist, and mark off
the steps as they are completed.  The checklist would provide a helpful tool
for checking, and a good summary of the information.

At a more granular level, it would be helpful to link to more information
about completing the actual steps.  For example, the preliminary review
suggests five steps including turning off images, changing screen size, etc.
Not all developers will know how to do that, so to provide steps for
performing that (Go to the desktop, right-click, choose settings tab, change
your screen size) would be helpful.


We hope these comments will be helpful.  Thank you for the opportunity to
review the draft.  Please let me know if you have any questions.  Best
regards,

Chris

Chris Jones
SSB Technologies
(415) 975-8011
chris@ssbtechnologies.com

SSB Technologies named to FCW's 2001 "10 Companies to Watch"

According to CNET's "bottom line": "SSB Technologies tools are the best in
their class"

Received on Friday, 2 November 2001 13:11:21 UTC