Web accessibility is an important issue, more and more companies are being sued for not complying!
The site we currently used to test for AAA compliancy has been taken on by IBM and no-longer support for public testing.
I’ve had a hunt on the web and done a few tests using the following tools:
Fujitsu Web Accessibility App (http://www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/wi/) – You need the latest JAVA installed on your machine (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp - scroll down to “Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 5”).
Once installed I’ve checked URL and typed in “http://www.creative-jar.com/” hit “start checking” now I’m presented with a webpage displaying a list of guidelines. I’ve clicked on the http://www.creative-jar.com/ link on the page which jumps me down the page to the priority levels (1 – A, 2 – AA, 3 – AAA). Below this is the whole list of problems, detailing in what needs to be done to correct this. If you click on view, it’ll load up the page highlighting the problem.
Firefox Accessibility plug-in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5809
This adds the accessibility tool bar, where you’ll find a button on the left named “reports” – click this and select “Accessibility Issues”. This will load up a new window listing all the issues, double clicking on the issue will pop up a box with all the occurring problems, also highlighting the problem on the webpage. These are tested to the AAA compliance standards on http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Recently I have noticed a new addition to the guidelines which was not in the bobby webxact tool. This being the contrast ratio of text and backgrounds. The ratio is 3:1, which eliminates nice little details on a lot of sites :/ bah!
I suggest for all those who do testing and building use the firefox plug-in for it’s a quick and easy way to check for problems.
The fujitsu app, is nice but might be long winded for updating small problems.