Web Accessibility services and resources for producing web sites accessible to people with special needs.
Many companies choose to start simply with Accessibility. There are relatively simple HTML changes that can be easily made and tested that can provide a signficant improvement in Accessibility with minimal cost. There are developer tools or techniques for adding them to the site, and there are many different testing tools that will test for these Accessibility features. Many of them can be objectively tested (at least partically) so they lend themselves to automated testing or validators. This a great place to start.
The Section 508 tools can be grouped by the skill and time it takes to test for the different standards. For this tutorial, we will be addressing each of the tutorials by the ease with which they can be tested.
Many major HTML development tools, such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX, provide simple accessibility testing as a feature in the software. All the commercial Accessibility testing tools will test for these standards. Because these standards are realitively objective and easy to test, there are many free tools on-line or added to a browser. The Web Accessibility Toolbar is a free tool providing a range of accessibility testing tools. It only runs on Internet Explorer. Firefox offers several extensions with basic accessibility tests. Web Developer is similar to Web Accessibility Toolbar, providing a variety of accessibility testing tools. Checky Firefox extension uses its menu to provide links to many on-line accessibility testing tools and validators. The National Center for Accessible Media has a free Accessibility QA Favelet with a variety of testing tools. Their image option provides an simple list of all the images on the page with the alt text and a copy of the image for convenient verification that the image has the correct text.
Basic web standards are an easy way of improving accessibility and usability for this group of standards. Developer code review and code validation will catch many of problems with the Section 508 standards. Developers who follow best practices will have little difficulty with these standards.