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Cynthia Says... Create Accessible Web Sites
Kynn writes "The folks at ICDRI, in partnership with the Internet society and HiSoftware, bring us Cynthia Says, a free service to help you evaluate your Web pages for accessibility. In other words, it's roughly equivalent to what Bobby used to be, before it went commercial. It features what seems to be a cartoon version of my friend Cynthia Waddell, which is a bit creepy, but in all honesty it's a much better symbol than the old cartoon cop used with Bobby. I always thought there was an implied menace, as if the smiling chap would happily bludgeon you with his truncheon if you created an inaccessible Web site." If only.
Don't forget to use ALT tags!
Ok, ok, so there's more to it than that. However, in my designs, I've begun to apply the following rule of thumb in regards to web accessibility:
The page is accessible if it can be properly viewed and navigated using a text-based browser (i.e. Lynx).
Lynx forces the page creator to use ALT tags liberally, and it reduces or eliminates the page's dependency on things like Javascript and Flash.
What else, really, has to be considered outside of the limitations of a text-based browser? I'd love to read some comments from folks with more expertise in this area.
I've had the pleasure of working with HiSoftware and all I can say is that it's a steaming pile of junk.
It does NOT play very well W3C standards - so expect your nice XHTML Compliant webpage to be choke when it's run through the software. You can forget about CSS layouts "validating". You'll end up fighting the software instead of fixing your site.
If you want an accessible website that is Section 508 compliant, use the W3C's Web Content Accessability Guidelines. If you pass those, you'll pass government regs.
There is NO need for you or your company to waste money on this kind of software - and it's lame to see all these companies selling government agencies on this "this software will make your pages compliant for only $4000!" and having those agencies roll over and waste money on this software.
Oddly enough, those agencies that took the time to code to W3C standards in the first place happen to have very little trouble passing these guidelines.
The problem is, it's not a matter of just allowing "text-only" browsers to correctly display your page; your pages should "make sense" from a semantical point of view, thus allowing semantic interpreters (such as browsers for blind persons and so on) to easily and correctly parse them. e.g. put the "title" attribute in your anchors, consider accesskeys, validate your xhtml, etc etc.
For further things, take a look at Dive Into Accessibility, a really good book.
-- Let's go Viridian.