 |
Functional
Non-Functional
|
|
 
Efficient Accessibility Testing
The W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) contain 65 criteria, so significant resources would be required if every page of a site was to be tested against each criterion. Fortunately this is not necessary, and there are several efficiencies to be made:
- Only test the appropriate criteria. The 65 criteria are divided into three Priority levels. The Priority 1 criteria are the most important, so if you only need to achieve a basic level of accessibility it is only neccessary to test these 16 criteria.
Most websites should aim to meet the Priority 2 criteria, which requires a further 30 criteria to be tested, but this still represents a 30% saving.
Many of the Priority 3 criteria require coding techniques that are not part of mainstream development practice. It is rarely worth testing them unless the website has been specifically designed to meet this level.
- Don't test every page. Most sites are based on templates, and it is usually sufficient to test one example of each template. Additional pages may be required depending on the content e.g. data tables, forms, lists, images maps etc. We will gladly perform an audit of your site to determine the minimum number of pages to be tested; on a typical 100-page website we often find that 4 or 5 are sufficient.
- Lightweight test tools. Although we rarely find the use of heavyweight tools to be helpful, we use a variety of lightweight tools to improve the efficiency and accuracy of code inspection.
- Expertise and experience. It takes time to learn all the web technologies such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Flash, DHTML etc, to understand the rationale behind the 65 WCAG criteria and develop the techniques for testing them. We are already at the top of this learning curve, so our efficiency will lower your costs and shorten your timescales.
|
|
|
