User Accessibility Guidelines

There are different standards to make web content accessible by all users:

• WCAG - external link - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by W3C.
• AccessibleTWiki - external link - US Government procurement regulation "Section 508" defining accessability standards for people with disabilities.
• external link - Web accessibility guidlines by IBM

Tools to test web content for accessability:

• http://webxact.watchfire.com/ - test web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
• http://www.contentquality.com/ - test web content for WCAG and Section 508 compliance.

-- Contributors: DavidLeBlanc, PeterThoeny - 19 Jan 2007

Discussion

I came across this URL: http://www.cast.org/bobby/ which offers a free service to submit a URL to be checked for conformance with the W3C web access guidelines and also USC (United States Code) section 508 (presumably something to do with access for persons with disabilities).

I tried my home TWiki with this and it returned an interesting report on how TWiki did/did not conform (Only W3C conformance checked), including line numbers of the html at issue.

Given that businesses do hire handicapped people, and that TWiki is focused on business users, this might be something worthwhile for TWiki to conform to. It also returned a lot of what i'd call good presentation practice hints (put headers on columns in tables if they're not just for layout control).

Personally, i'm getting to the age where people (not TWiki per se) who code their websites to use hard-coded 8pt type really p**s me off! I freqently have to shift over to Mozilla which, thankfully, tends to ignore hard-coded font sizes when I use the view zoom text feature (unlike IE crap). It's even worse when they think that grey on white is a good way to display this 8pt type!

-- DavidLeBlanc - 14 Apr 2002

A good idea to do this - see also XhtmlConsideredHarmful for some discussion of pro's and cons of using XHTML, although there are other ways to be conformant to standards.

OperaBrowser is very good for reading illegible sites - you can turn off all site-specified formatting with a single button on a toolbar, and can also substitute your own formatting, e.g. font size. Of course, this should not be necessary, but good web design is not that wide spread....

-- RichardDonkin - 15 Apr 2002

IBM has useful guidelines at http://www-306.ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/accessweb.html

-- PeterThoeny - 21 Feb 2005