Accessible Design: Best Practices

Validation

WAC Web Site Evaluation

The OSU Web Accessibility Center (WAC) analyzes web pages for accessibility to people with disabilities. The WAC offers this as a free service to OSU faculty and staff to expand the use of technology by people disabilities The WAC's goal is to ensure that all distance education and online courses at OSU are fully accessible to persons with disabilities.

To have your web site analyzed, please Request a Site Review using our online form . We will report any accessibility and/or browser compatibility errors found on the page. Once your site receives WAC approval, you are entitled to display a WAC approved icon on your site.

The WebXact Validator

WebXact (formerly WebXact), accessibility validator, is a free service that will allow you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG. WebXact can be a great first step to understanding accessibility guidelines.

How to Use the WebXact Validator

1. Go to WebXact's home page.
2. Enter a web page address in the URL box and click "Go!.”
3. When the evaluation is done click on the "Accessibility"' tab to jump to the review of any issues found. Be sure to read through the Priority One issues and the Manual Check issues. The Manual Check issues can only be verified manually by checking the site.

Want to see WebXact in action? We've included it below -- just type in your URL. Don't have a web page? Try this URL: http://www.wac.ohio-state.edu -- does our site need corrections?

You can use Watchfire® WebXACT to scan and analyze any web page for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

Page URL:

Terms of use Copyright © 2003-2005 Watchfire Corporation. All Rights Reserved

A-Prompt Web Accessibility Verifier

A-Prompt offers a step-by-step guide to identifying and repairing accessibility issues. It even provides automatic repair for most common issues.

Like WebXact, A-Prompt is a free service. However, unlike WebXact, which can be used online, A-Prompt must be downloaded and installed on your machine. Yet, A-Prompt offers many more automated features that guide you through retrofitting your site. In its current format as a standalone for PC platform, A-Prompt allows the author to select a file or for validation and repair, or select an single HTML element within a file.

The tool may be customized to check for different conformance levels, based on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

If an accessibility problem is detected, A-Prompt displays the necessary dialogs and guides the user to fix the problem. Many repetitive tasks are automated, such as the addition of ALT-text or the replacement of server-side image maps with client-side image maps.

When all potential problems have been resolved, the repaired HTML code is inserted into the document and a new version of the file may be saved to the author's hard drive. After a web page has been checked and repaired by A-Prompt it will be given a WAI Conformance ranking.

Other Validator’s

Also try the W3C's HTML validator. A more complete list of evaluation software with links is available on the W3C site: "Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility.”

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