Hi Jerome, Validate first, with http://validator.w3.org/ or built-in validators in Dreamweaver, etc. Assistive technologies can choke on poorly formed or invalid code.
If the site's more of a content site, check: - Navigation / links - can you reach all navigation (including nav bar menus) via the keyboard? if not, do you have landing pages that can be reached by keyboard as alternative to mouseover menus? - Text - if you use images for headings, nav links, etc. do you have alt attribute or text behind it (and is your image still readable when zoomed in?) - Headings - are they identified via , , etc.? That helps people jump to different parts of the document and bypass nav menus - Tables of data - do you have table headers identified with (CSS classes like "heading" etc. aren't enough) - Search, contact fields - when you have form elements, do you use label tags or title attribute to provide labels? (preferrably visible onscreen to help all visitors) if you have drop-down menus, can users select from them and then select the action (e.g., select a category, then click Go; vs. automatically moving to another place as they select) - Unique labels - if you have PDFs and other doc lists, are the links or icons labeled with unique on-screen text (preferrably) or title attribute (so someone using screen reader doesn't har "PDF PDF PDF" etc.) If the site's a web-based app, forms and tables for presenting record/data collections are usually more of the beast. You'll want to check items above, and then really go deep into the forms, checking that: - tags are used, preferrably explicitly (e.g., labelname... - and are used with groupings of related fields (e.g., multiple parts to an address block, phone numbers with extensions, etc.) - error messages and feedback can be communicated to users, possibly via tags within the tags (set span to hidden when there's no error message, and then set to visible when there's an error so it's picked up by assistive technology) - any data-dependent items (e.g., lists refresh based on selection)? is the change downstream? - if you're using AJAX and other RIA components, let me know and it'd be easier to talk you through what to check There's more (e.g., image maps, frames, etc.), but the above covers most of the usual problems. For what it's worth, the automated tools can help, but you're better off with a good approach and plugins for Firefox / IE to check things. The automated tools can give some false positives and negatives that could be pretty critical. Good luck! Kate http://www.cxinsights.com http://twitter.com/kwalser http://www.linkedin.com/in/katewalser http://delicious.com/walserk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=45660 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
