Web Access Centre Blog

Many of you might be aware that as of the 1st February this year, Bobby and WebXact are no longer publicly available online. Bobby and WebXact were great tools for giving you a quick overview of the accessibility of a single web page free of charge. While there is only so much automated testing tools can do, they never the less have their place in the arsenal of anyone testing websites.

After the news, we had a couple of emails come our way from people asking if we knew of any alternatives to Bobby and WebXact and the answer is…we do! There is a great resource available on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site which is a complete list of web accessibility evaluation tools. This would be a good place to start for anyone looking to find a new tool to use.

These are some of the favourites used by our team. Interestingly, the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) tool includes support for checking against the draft WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

• Cynthia Says
• WAVE
• ATRC Web Accessibility Checker

For those wishing to do some more manual checks with a little assistance, there are some great accessibility toolbars and plug-ins available for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF).

• Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE
• Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar for FF
• Jon Gunderson’s Firefox Accessibility Extension

Finally, some links to the well known Markup Validation Services provided by the W3C.

• (X)HTML, SMIL, MathML Validation
• CSS Validation

We hope these help!

At Oz-IA last weekend, the Australia Information Architecture conference in Sydney, Gary Bunker and Gabriele Hermansson presented on User Research in Virtual Worlds.

They talked about how their company Hyrdo, have set out to build a research platform to allow user testing within virtual worlds, not only for their experiences there but also of products in real life. This is a great idea on so many levels. Firstly, user testing can be daunting to set up, it can be hard to get cross cultural input or people may feel out of their comfort zone. What struck me as really exciting however is the idea of being able to carry out user testing by people with disabilities in virtual worlds.

I’ve wanted to see testing of the grid by users with disabilities in Second Life for a while and have been informally chatting to people there about their experiences. You have a community of Residents who are already familiar with the world who are excited about what they can do there and its lack of real life constraints. Being able to solve problems of access through the combined efforts of Residents themselves and trained experts is a positive and effective way forward. Testing in-world also removes some of the potential issues around testing by people with disabilities in real life such as:

• Travel and costs
• Supplying equipment, assistive technologies and support
• Payment and possible conflict of interest if a tester already earns a salary or is on benefits. Presumably payment in Linden Dollars transcends these issues.

Recently there have been some interesting projects set up looking at access for users with visual impairments most notably IBM announcing research in opening up virtual worlds to the blind. Involving users themeselves is essential in any design project but especially so when it comes to users with disabilities.