Understanding Web Accessibility Standards and Open Source Tools
Sunday, Oct 13 1:00 - 4:30
Presented by Jon GundersonParticipants will learn how to use free and open source tools to evaluate and understand the accessibility of entire organizations to individual pages based on the requirements of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level A and AA requirements. Participants are encouraged to bring and use their own devices during the workshop to analyze websites and pages of their choice. The workshop will use the results of participants as a discussion point of how the tools provide information on accessibility and discuss the limits of automated testing. The suite of tools can be used to evaluate and inspect entire organizations (e.g. collections of websites), websites (e.g. pages in the same domain) and individual web pages and include WebAIMs WAVE, Deque aXe, AInspector Sidebar, Accessibility Bookmarklets, FAE 2.0 and FAEAuditor.
The workshop will explore the reporting structure, especially how to interpret evaluation results. Some tools focus on only tests the can result in pass/fail and other tools will identify results that require human evaluation to determine it an accessibility requirement has been addressed. The workshop will help people understand how to use the authoring requirements of the W3C ARIA Authoring Practices techniques to meet WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA requirements. The ARIA Authoring Practices provide design information to meet WCAG 2.1 requirements. Many other automated evaluation tools are based primarily on the WCAG 2.1 failure techniques. The failure techniques provide a limited view of WCAG 2.1 requirements and a limited understanding of how web standards can be used to create highly accessible and usable websites for people with disabilities. The workshop will also be a listening point for participants to provide valuable feedback to improve the design of the tools and to guide development of new features.
About
Jon Gunderson
Accessible IT Group CoordinatorDr. Gunderson has been leading IT accessibility efforts at the University of Illinois for 20 years and in the development of web standards for accessibility. He is a member of the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) task force and major contributor to the ARIA Authoring Practices. He leads the development of the open source web evaluation tools Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) 2.0, AInspector WCAG add-ons for Firefox and Accessibility-Bookmarklets. He has taught numerous online courses and workshops on accessible web design including courses including the new Illinois IT Accessibility badging courses.