[Athen] Testing Web Accessibility

[Sylvia Richardson]

Hi Ron,

The WAVE tool is a Chrome extension, a small plugin for Chrome, so it does not work at all outside Chrome, by design. It is not assistive tech by itself, just a tool for developers to identify common errors like incorrect form labels and missing alternate text.

In general, Chrome has a relatively weak accessibility API, so it does not play well with tools like NVDA or JAWS. For those readers, I recommend using Firefox or IE.

-Sylvia

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Ron Stewart
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 6:49 PM
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
Subject: Re: [Athen] Testing Web Accessibility

Karen can you speak to how well the Chrome Wave tool works on non-Chrome environments. In my experience it does not provide  the same experience outside the Chrome environment. In particular in Windows based AT.

Ron

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Karen Sorensen
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 2:30 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: Re: [Athen] Testing Web Accessibility

Hi Jessica,
The Chrome WAVE extension will work in your LMS (it's more up to date than the Firefox WAVE extension. )
We do automated and manual testing at our institution to check online courses against WCAG 2.0 AA standards. When we encounter interactive elements however (elements that normally would require input with a mouse), we have end users of assistive technologies do usability testing. Interactive objects are not easily tested with automated tools or by manual testers who are not native users of AT. We currently have experienced JAWS and VoiceOver end users do testing for us of these interactive objects. We would like to add a Dragon user and a keyboard only user to our team.
For our automated testing we use Sortsite and WAVE. But I just want to really stress that manual testing which we all realize is needed in addition to the automated testing, must actually include real end users. This is so often ignored, and I can tell you there really is no substitute. I'd be happy to share our testing process with anyone who is interested.
Best,
Karen


Karen M. Sorensen
Accessibility Advocate for Online Courses
www.pcc.edu/access<http://www.pcc.edu/access>
Portland Community College
971-722-4720


Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina

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