Adaptive Technology Web Accessibility

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Saved by Ryan S. Overdorf
on July 5, 2010 at 8:33:39 pm

Web Accessibility

Creating accessible web pages is an excellent way to effectively communicate with patrons who use adaptive technology. The Committee acknowledges that not all CS-SIS members work in institutions where they can control or influence the web site design; however, many do.

This page links to accessibility guidelines and to selected organizations promoting web accessibility. The Committee does not necessarily endorse the viewpoints advocated. The discussion of the wiki's accessibility issues occurrs after the accessibility guidelines links but before the links to selected advocacy organizations.

Accessibility Guidelines

Section 508

A federal government web site that discusses Section 508, an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act (codified in the federal regulations at 36 C.F.R.§1194.22). Section 508 applies to federal agencies. The Department of Justice has used section 508 to measure Web accessibility when reaching settlements with local municipalities. It is the simpler of the two commonly quoted guidelines for web accessibility.

Web Accessibility Initiative

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines lead to a higher level of accessibility but are also the more complex of the two commonly quoted guidelines for Web accessibility.

Accessibility Tools

WAVE

WAVE generates a report listing web accessibility errors and other elements that may require attention to make a website fully accessible. It is a service of WebAIM which is affiliated with Utah State University.

W3C Validator

Validates HTML code against accepted international standards.

After completing the first of the newer edits to this page, Ryan ran it through the WAVE accessibility tool. It detected 13 accessibility errors. Nine of those occurred in the content he created. Most of these were created through improper coding by the WYSIWYG editor.

Because the wiki allows editing of the source code for content created by the user, these errors were theoretically fixable. However, it did not save some of the formatting code Ryan created, making the properly coded page look worse than the improperly coded one. Even if this could be solved, the necessity of fixing the WYSIWYG errors defeats the purpose of having a WYSIWYG editor. It also means that every time the editor is used, an author commits fresh violations of accessibility guidelines. It took more than 30 minutes to clean up the coding errors on a relatively short section of the page.

WAVE also detects elements which may or may not be errors depending on the context in which they are used. In addition to the two errors outside of the space and account holder may edit, there are also two improper uses of unordered lists.

Another coding error prevented the validator from even running on this page.

The Committee is currently investigating solutions to the accessibility problem.