Accessibility checkers are fantastic tools to make sure that documents and websites can be accessed by persons with disabilities. Will a screen reader be able to read all the text in your doucument? How about images – are their meanings conveyed to users who can’t actually see them? Is there sufficient colour contrast on your website so users with colour blindness can see it? Are your videos closed captioned for people with hearing loss? Lots of things to consider!
Take a document of your choosing (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF) or a website and run it through an online accessibility checker. Here are some to choose from:
- Windows Accessibility Checker (and what the various errors/warnings mean) – for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote
- Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool – for websites
- Acrobat’s Accessibility Tool – for PDFs
What did it flag as errors/concerns? What surprised you most about the feedback? How can you accommodate these issues in future documents/sites you create?
The deadline for points is Tuesday, October 23, at 10AM
My submission:
https://trello.com/c/ZdMyQpY1/126-wd-w5-rashed
I tested the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool for websites.
Wikipedia: I thought this would be a candidate website for the control-group. But to my surprise there were hundreds of errors and alerts for the article on Charles Scott (governor). But most errors were of the same type. For example, there were links with no texts. But these were just images that were links. Another error that came up a lot was how the descriptive text for a link was the same as the link. But this is also because most links are links to articles with the exact same name. However, the tool also found hundreds of features and elements that are compliant with accessibility standards. For example: image captions, different heading levels and different languages.
I looked up Wikipedia’s efforts to make their pages more accessible and found their Accessibility Page and their Accessibility Project.