Where to StartWhen it comes to assessing your website’s accessibility, online grading tools are a helpful first step
Resources such as aCe, along with WAVE and SiteImprove browser plugins, make it easier than ever to check your website’s current compliance status. These automated tools quickly scan your website for basic accessibility trademarks and give you a checklist of elements that need work.
However, there is a limit to what these grading tools can do. No matter how advanced site-crawlers get, they’ll never experience a website as people do. W3C, a leading industry voice and worldwide guide for web standards, says that “comprehensive and effective evaluations require evaluators with an understanding of web technologies, evaluation tools, barriers that people with disabilities experience, assistive technologies and approaches that people with disabilities use, and accessibility guidelines and techniques.” In other words, it takes real humans. (more…)