standards and tools

This page considers emerging global standards, government and industry guidelines, and tools for determining whether your site is up to scratch. 

It covers -

• W3C standards and tools
• WAC, PAS 78 and other standards
• government guidelines
• bibliographies and resources
• evaluation tools
• other tools

     W3C standards and tools

An appropriate starting point is the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3 Consortium, the web's main standards body.

WAI has published detailed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), describing what makes a site accessible for people with disabilities. 

The Guidelines are supported by a range of documents on the W3C site, in particular the Techniques for Web Content Accessibility (TWCA) that explains how to implement the guidelines.

There is a fact sheet answering commonly asked questions and an online training package.

The guidelines are complemented by separate Authoring Tool Guidelines (ATAG), aimed at those developing products used in building sites.

Jakob Nielsen notes that the WAI has continued to

promote the original ideal of Web design: a single HTML page that will adapt to all different usage circumstances, from huge monitors to small hand-helds and from seeing to blind users.

The W3C has also promoted a Validator tool.

Compliance with the standard has been uneven. One Australian survey in mid-2003 claimed for example that the home pages of Microsoft, IBM, Apple, HP, Oracle, Dell, Gateway, Canon, Epson, Sony, Google, Sun, Adobe, Macromedia, Cisco, 3Com, McAfee, Redhat, SourceForge, Verisign and Yahoo weren't compliant.

The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (TEI) are also online. TEI, discussed in our electronic publishing guide, is an international project to develop guidelines for the encoding of textual material using SGML for research purposes.

     other standards

In the UK the British Standards Institution (BSI) released its PAS 78 - Publicly Available Specification - in 2006. Describes as a guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites, PAS 78 covers -

• commissioning, building, publishing and maintaining a website
• defining an accessibility policy
• the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines - why they are important and which ones to follow
• how to check that a site conforms to best practice
• additional measures that go beyond WAI guidance

Accessible of course does not equal free: access to the standard will put you back a mere £30.

IBM has published Web Accessibility Guidelines (WAC), including a checklist.

The US National Library of Medicine offers Guidelines for Designing Web Sites For Aging Populations (PDF). Ironically, they are only available in PDF, contrary to the Library's own standards.

The provocative Wasp at The Web Standards Project (a site designer/developer coalition "Fighting for Standards in our Browsers") considers standards issues from a more market-oriented perspective than much of the WAI documentation.

The Accessibility Web Action Plan (AWAP) of the Australian Internet Industry Association (IIA) and the Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association aims to provide all online businesses with a framework for implementing accessible site design.

The nature of broader internet standards is discussed here and in Alexander Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press 2004).

     government guidelines

The Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) has updated its World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes (DDANotes).

The Commonwealth government's AusInfo has released detailed electronic publishing guidelines for public sector agencies.

The National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) has published a Guide to Minimum Website Standards, a Commonwealth Agency Website & Internet System Security Checklist (PDF) and Best Practice Website notes.

The AusIinfo guidelines include some discussion of accessibility issues and standards. The NSW government has published a specific standards document and particular sectors are developing specialist guides or standards, such as the Legal Information Standards Council's Best Practice Guidelines for Australian Legal Websites (BPALW).

In New Zealand the government has published detailed Government Web Guidelines (PDF).

     bibliographies and resources

The ACM's Human-Computer Interaction Bibliography (HCIB) is exhaustive. It includes extensive links to newsgroups, guidelines, research reports and other accessibility resources.

The US-based WebAble is an important resource, offering electronic access to standards, guidelines and research material. Robert Davison's guidelines on E-Publishing for Developing Countries is applicable to remote Australia.

Axel Schmetzke's Accessible Webpage Design site offers pointers to a range of resources.

There are pointers to other bibliographies in the design guide and in the next page of this guide.

     evaluation tools

The WCAG site points to a wide range of evaluation tools that are meant to quickly identify some accessibility problems on sites.

Several of the tools include some automated checking. They do not automatically check everything, but offer guidance on areas that need to be examined by people rather than machines.

The tool that has arguably gained widest publicity and thus greatest acceptance is BOBBY, a free online service developed by the US Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) but now provided by Watchfire Website Management. Bobby analyses web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities: you simply enter the URL of the page that you want Bobby to examine and click Submit, before viewing a report indicating any accessibility and/or browser compatibility errors found on the page.

Use of BOBBY has proved problematical. As we noted in our paper cited above, it is common to see Australian federal government and business sites that bear the 'BOBBY Approved' seal but fail key aspects of the online BOBBY test. Ironically, the CAST and Watchfire sites also fail the test ... an example of the cobbler's own shoes?

Bobby is mechanistic, essentially identifying whether tags are present and code is properly formatted but not indicating whether the code is meaningful. Bobby necessarily covers only those matters that can be automatically tested (eg whether images have 'alt' tags), not whether text is readable or whether there is sufficient contrast between text and background colour.

A competing tool is Cynthia Says, developed by the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI). There appears to be increasing support for the A-prompt Web Accessibility Verifier, noted in the 2002 Two Falls out of Three in the Automated Accessibility Assessment of World Wide Web Sites: A-Prompt v. Bobby (PDF) study by Dan Diaper & Linzy Worman.

In addition to the checklists noted above, we recommend the Canadian Public Service Commission's Accessibility Self-Evaluation Test (PSC).

A 2003 paper by Steve Faulkner & Andrew Arch on Accessibility Testing Software Compared offers insights about several tools, as does the 2003 Web Accessibility Validation and Repair: Which Tool and Why? paper by Laurie Harrison & Laura O'Grady.

     other tools

Adobe now offers an email service for conversion of PDF documents to text or HTML.

Adobe has also released a white paper on Optimising Adobe PDF Files for Accessibility.

Basic measures of readability include the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid tests (featured on Microsoft Word), the Fry Formula, SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledegook) test and Gunning Fog index.

They are indicative only (readability online can be significantly affected by placement and format of the text). As Rudolf Flesch wisely commented in his The Art of Readable Writing (New York: Wiley 1994) -

Some readers, I am afraid, will expect a magic formula for good writing and will be disappointed with my little yardstick ... What I hope for are readers who won't take the formula too seriously and won't expect from it more than a rough estimate.

There is information about those tools in a more detailed supplementary profile on readability.

   next part  (accessibility studies)