You’ve carefully read and tried to tick the boxes for most of those irritating government web accessibility standards, and the W3C accessibility Standards, and still the pesky ‘crips and blindies’ complain about your web site not being accessible to them. What to do?
Sadly all the box ticking in the world won’t guarantee an accessible web site. Accessibility is not all about a score on a list of standards, although of course standards provide the basis for best practice, and they are certainly a necessary foundation for accessibility. But adherence to standards alone will not guarantee the accessibility of your site.
Real world testing is an essential element of web accessibility. By that I mean testing by a variety of disabled users with their regular technology and in their regular everyday situations so the real problems they as users experience can be revealed, and solved.
In ten years experience we have discovered that there are some critical aspects of accessibility that will only be discovered by real disabled testers. Alternative text for images is an example. Only a human tester can tell if it adds real meaning to the information on the page for them.
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