Web Site Validation and Accessibility Testing
It is estimated that up to 85% of websites do not comply with accessibility standards and guidelines yet there are some 600 million people in the world who have some form of disability
Web Site Validation is important for many reasons but in the main it ensures that our web pages look right across the most popular web browsers and that our content is available to a wider audience. By validating your web pages to known standards then you can be sure that they will work in future browser versions because all browser manufacturers are now committed to compliance with existing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards. In the end everyone benefits from this extra effort and it also makes web sites more available to disabled people and seniors, who happen to have a lot of spending power, but whose needs are often ingored. Validating a web page is not rocket science and there is no excuse for shoddy workmanship
Benefits of Web Site Validation
- Reduced code. Leaner web pages load faster and give more attention to the page content
- Provides clean page mark-up that is easily spidered by search engines
- Easily maintained and facilitates design changes quickly
- Backward compatibility with older browsers
- Forward compatibility with new browsers
- Saves you money for the reasons listed above
This is a no-brainer. Validating a web page is simple and there are free online tools available for checking html and cascading style sheet (CSS) files for markup and accesibility errors. Markup validation tests check your files for syntax errors and return a pass / fail result listing the errors found. The W3C validator offers hints on how to fix errors and offers additional tips about how the page mark-up might be improved
Once your pages pass the html and css validation markup tests you are required by law to carry out accessibility testing for disabled users. Accessibility testing is a legal obligation and quite rightly so considering that 54 million Americans have some form of disability. It is easy to grasp the importance of Web Accessibility. At the very least it would be unprofessional but more importantly it would be immoral to exclude these people from accessing a website. The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) via it's Web Accesibility Initiative (WAI) describes practices and guidelines for making your website more accessible. Links to these resources can be found at the end of this article
Html and Css Testing
Testing is a job most web designers hate but personally I enjoy it because it is more like Engineering than Design. When you get into the routine of testing your web pages it becomes second nature and as a result I very rarely find excuses for not testing
If a web page contains a syntax error then it may look fine in one browser but not in others. Even if a page is valid it may still not look right in Internet Explorer(IE) due to the fact that IE has a mind of its own and has a poor reputation with compliance to published web standards. This is known as WYSINWOG - What You See Is Not What Others Get
Versions of all the major browsers are available for Windows and the list includes but is not limited to : Firefox, IE, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. As we can see there is no shortage of tools available to help us test our websites. Ensuring that web pages work in all browsers is called Cross Browser Testing and no serious web developer would even think about publishing a web page without knowing that is has been well tested and works in all the major browsers
You should validate every time you make changes to your html and css files. If something goes wrong when you are tweaking a web page then it is important to ensure that you are at least working with valid code. This cuts down the debugging effort because then you know that it is your mark-up which is at fault and not the browser
Browsers have two operating modes - standards mode and quirks mode. We want to avoid quirks mode because it is unpredictable and can lead to a situation where you just end up chasing your tail. We can force all browsers into standards mode if we include a DocType at the top of all our web pages before running our Html and CSS files through the validator
Web Accessibility
Web Accessibility is concerned with the human aspect of the web and is based on rules and guidelines as opposed to being an exact science. Accessibility techniques provide real benefits to end users and these include functions like easily printable web pages, font resizing and text to speech for blind users
Benefits of Web Accessibility Testing
- High quality markup improves the performance of your website
- Increased usability and easy access from a wider range of devices
- Improved readability and easier navigation
- Improved search engine rankings
- Better services to people with disabilities
- More business - Cell Phone, PDA, PC and Laptop users can all access your content
- Covers your legal obligations as a web site owner
- Makes you look professional
Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
Priotity 1
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents
Priotity 2
A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing web documents
Priotity 3
A Web content developer may satisfy this checkpoint. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to web documents
References and Resources
Quality Assurance tips for Webmasters - W3C resource
The W3C mark-up Validation Service for testing html
The W3C CSS Validation Service for testing css
Cynthia Says Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) validation tool
W3C MobileOK Checker Is your web site mobile friendly?
Why validate? - W3C article
The W3C XHTML 1 Specification for educational and reference use
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 for educational and reference use
Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 for educational and reference use
Total Validator is a free desktop application for use as an all-in-one validator comprising HTML validator, accessibility validator, a spell checker, broken link checker, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages will look like. It's good so check it out
