WebAIM is doing another online web accessibility training this year. Last year’s was good (and free) enough that I bought the training materials on CD-ROM. This year’s is not free, but I like some of the things they’re doing, namely breaking it out into tracks. And there’s a handy education discount. Looks worth it.

In case you haven’t tried it, I suggest that you try the updated version of WAVE, an online accessibility tool that is now developed by WebAIM. It’s in beta but is still a far sight better than most other tools.

A lot of people like Bobby. I don’t. The problems that Bobby can check automatically are almost all things that a good markup validator checks for: missing alt text, DOCTYPE declarations, and so on. Most pages turn up a fair number of user checks that need to be done, which is fine except for two things: messages from Bobby are cryptic and unhelpful, and it’s not clear how to evaluate some of what Bobby flags as possible problems (especially to novices). The W3C‘s markup validator has much more helpful messages, even to those who don’t know HTML well.

So how do you do the user checks? That’s where WAVE comes in. Plug in a URL, and WAVE returns tha page at that URL marked up with icons that you can use to evaluate the accessibility of that page. For example, rather than simply flagging missing alt text, WAVE goes a step further and displays the alt text so you can determine whether it’s actually useful. It identifies structural markup (headers, lists, etc.) to help you evaluate whether the page is marked up properly. WAVE calls your attention to mouse-activated JavaScript events, so you can decide whether they should also be keyboard-triggered.

When evaluating and improving the accessibility of a web page, I do at least these two things:

  1. Clean up the markup, with the aid of a validator or HTML Tidy. This alone addresses many/most accessibility problems.
  2. Use WAVE to help identify anything else that needs cleaning up.

There’s always room for improvement, but I find that’s usually enough — or at least is all that automated tools can help with. Other accessibility issues tend to be global in nature, relating to navigation, content, and so on, and require more sophisticated analysis.