WTA-77: Accessibility Checking for All
Date: November 12, 2016
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific (1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. eastern)
Facilitator: Michael Larsen
Participants: Isthiyak Ahamed, JeanAnn Harrison, Srinivas Kadiyala, Michael Larsen, Dolores Zurdo,
As is often the case, when it comes to accessibility, sometimes we learn what is needed, and then we look for a tool. Other times, learning to use a tool can help us understand better the underlying requirements. Much like a spell-checker, it can tell you that words are misspelled, and offer suggestions for spelling them correctly, but it won’t teach you the rules of grammar needed to confirm the corrections are in context or appropriate for that moment. this session is going to attempt to do a little bit of both. It’s meant to be an introduction to Accessibility Testing, using a specific tool in the process.
We will be using AChecker. Why? It’s an open source evaluation tool that lets users submit web pages via URL, direct file upload and also pasting snippets of HTML into a window. With this, you can evaluate a full page or something as small as a few lines of HTML. It also has a god range of standards to compare with (HTML Validator, BITV, Section 508 , Stanca Act, WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0.
During the session, we had some interesting observations about what the tool showed and the varying levels of context it provided. A nice touch was that in many instances it actually stated what the required values for conformance were, such as (with https://www.google.com):
Success Criteria 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) (AA)
http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-contrast-contrast.html#visual-audio-contrast-contrast-resources-head
 Line 41, Column 4751:
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Chat transcript can be viewed here.
I’m a software tester working with Socialtext in Palo Alto, CA. I have worked in a number of different fields and in a number of different capacities. I started my testing career in March of 1991.
I am co-founder and primary facilitator for Weekend Testing Americas. I am a black-belt in the Miagi-do School of Software Testing, a member and Teacher in the Association for Software Testing, and the producer of Software Test Professionals' "This Week in Software Testing" podcast (now on hiatus).