Accessibility Audits

An Accessibility Audit provides a cost-effective method of gauging the overall accessibility of a site. It is useful for identifying major accessibility issues with an Intranet, Extranet or an Internet website.

An Accessibility Specialist identifies accessibility problems, which would impede the disabled users’ experience, by assessing the site against the guidelines set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The audit comprises both manual and automated inspections as neither is completely effective on its own.

The key benefits of an Interface IQ accessibility audit are clear:

• An Interface IQ audit extends beyond technical specification to overall accessibility with recommendations for improvement, and minimum changes required complying with baseline accessibility standards
• Benchmark your website, Intranet or extranet against accessibility standards

• Benefit from a report which explains the web accessibility guidelines in plain English
• Have an executive summary that shows at a glance where the accessibility problems on the site are to help rapidly target problem areas
• Take advantage of our in-depth experience and understanding of the accessibility guidelines and published coding standards.

This service can be used at the following stages of the product development cycle:

• Test
• Deployment.

Due to the size and complexity of most modern websites it would be almost impossible to test all pages manually and automatically. As such, representative samplings of different kinds of pages from the Web site to be reviewed are selected; these must include entry page(s) ("welcome page" etc.) The pages that are chosen are typically the main points of entry in each of the top-level menus and any pages with unique functionality. For example, on an eCommerce site a page with unique functionality would be the basket, or in a search engine it might be the results page. On a site with many ‘brochure-ware’ pages, however, only a sample would be selected that were representative of those type of pages.

This representative sample of the total pages allows a report to be provided that covers the majority of potential coding issues without duplicating effort across pages with identical code.

Interface IQ audits sites in a holistic way and the resulting accessibility problems encountered highlight a variety of issues found whilst traversing the most common paths through the site and interacting with the key functionalities. Examples of problems are extracted and compiled from across the site as a whole to help illustrate the issues. Pragmatic recommendations to counteract these problems are also provided in a clear manner.

Interface IQ audit using a variety of browsers, testing and assistive technologies:

• Main-stream Graphical Browser: Internet Explorer 6
• Disability-enabled Browsers: Opera 7, FireFox 1.0 (Mozilla)
• Text-only Browser: Lynx
• Colour Testing Tool: Photoshop, Vischeck
• Automated Tools: LIFT for Dreamweaver, Watchfire's Bobby
• HTML Validator: Site Valet 1.0, HTML Help, HTML Tidy, Cynthia Says
• Screen Reader: JAWS 4.0.

Interface IQ uses both manual and automated testing to leverage the maximum benefit from the audit. We have found that a combined manual and automated test routine provides the best results. Interface IQ follows the following testing methodology:

1. Representative samplings of different kinds of pages from the Web site are tested, including entry page(s), basket, checkout, registration, etc. The pages that are chosen are typically the main points of entry in each of the top-level menus and any pages with unique functionality
2. The pages are tested with a Mozilla based graphical browser such as FireFox, an accessibility enabled browser such as Opera, a textual browser such as Lynx and a screen reader such as JAWS or Window-Eyes. The pages are also tested with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer
3. The JAWS screen reader and the Lynx text browser are then used to examine the Website
4. An automated usability evaluation tool (such as UsableNet’s LIFT or Watchfire’s Bobby) is now used. These automated tools test web pages use the guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Access Initiative (WAI), as well as the US Section 508 guidelines. They provide a semi-automated assessment of accessibility problems on a Web page or group of Web pages; they can identify many problems on sites and list problems which they are not able to evaluate automatically and which require manual review). Unfortunately it is not possible to assess the accessibility of a site using only automated tools
5. Validation tools are used at this point to ensure the code conforms to published standards. The W3C provide free online HTML, XHTML and CSS validators.

The duration, and therefore cost, depends on the size and complexity of site to be tested. However, the following serve as a rough guide for a medium sized e-commerce website:

WAI Level A Audit

Duration: 7 days

Cost: £2,000 - £3,000

WAI Level Double-A Audit

Duration: 10 days

Cost: £3,000 – £4,000

Activities

1. Briefing meeting
2. Conduct audit to required standard
3. Analyse findings
4. Deliver report.

Deliverables

• Accessibility Audit report, including:
  • Analysis of test results
  • Overview of all the passed and failed guidelines and checkpoints
  • Detailed information on any accessibility issues
  • Practical, plain English recommendations on how to correct accessibility issues
  • Graphs of quantative information and best practice information
  • Why not view a sample Accessibility Evaluation report (WAI Level Double-A)?
• PowerPoint presentation (optional)
• Preparation & delivery of video highlights (optional).