Steve Faulkner, Web Accessibility Consultant, Vision Australia Foundation, 454 Glenferrie Rd, Kooyong 3144. steven.faulkner@visionaustralia.org.au
Andrew Arch, Manager Online Accessibility Consulting, Vision Australia Foundation, 454 Glenferrie Rd, Kooyong 3144. andrew.arch@visionaustralia.org.au
web accessibility, WCAG, testing tools, assessment, Bobby, InFocus, AccVerify, PageScreamer
Web accessibility for people with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups is becoming increasingly important for government and educational institutions as they try to meet their obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act and various policies and guidelines for online publishing. Business are also obligated under the DDA not to discriminate against people with disabilities as a result of their online activities.
A plethora of web accessibility testing tools have been released on to the market over the past eighteen months at prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars. This study looks at the ability of four of these testing tools to accurately assess the accessibility issues on a web site against the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 checkpoints. We conclude that they all have strengths and weaknesses and that none of them are able to identify all the accessibility issues. At this stage these tools can only aid accessibility testing, not provide a definitive assessment.
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