Automated Acccessibility Tool Problems

Trenton Moss founder of Webcredible published an interesting article on New Media Knowledge about the difference in getting an accessibility label and being accessible.

Moss says: “An automated accessibility tool is a piece of software which can test a Web page, or even an entire website, for accessibility. Automated accessibility tools are useful because they can save you a huge amount of time. Don’t want to check images for alt text on each and every page on your website? Run the site through an automated tester and it’ll do it all for you. Automated accessibility testing tools have been around for a long time and have historically been a useful way of checking websites for accessibility.
 
One of the first and most well-known automated accessibility testing tools, is now almost 10 years old, and although is no longer freely available, plenty of other free tools such as WebXact and Wave do exist.”
 
The article gives detailed information on what can go wrong and Moss shows that “automated accessibility testing tools can be useful as they can save a large amount of time in performing some very basic checks for accessibility.
However, they must be used with caution and they cannot be used as a stand-alone guide for accessibility checking. Indeed, some expert accessibility knowledge should always be applied in evaluating a site accessibility, perhaps in conjunction with the fantastic Web accessibility toolbar to help dramatically speed up manual checks.”
 
Source: New Media Knowledge (UK)