This is an in-class lab activity, to be completed during the first Lab Section meeting of the week of October 28th
Web Accessibility Testing
The goal of this short lab is to evaluate your midterm website against web content accessibilty guidelines (WCAG). As discussed in lecture, the WCAG is organized around four principles often referred to by the acronym POUR:
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Perceivable: Can users perceive the content? This helps us keep in mind that just because something is perceivable with one sense, such as sight, that doesn't mean that all users can perceive it.
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Operable: Can users use UI components and navigate the content?
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Understandable: Can users understand the content? Can users understand the interface and is it consistent enough to avoid confusion?
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Robust: Can the content be consumed by a wide variety of user agents (browsers)? Does it work with assistive technology?
Evaluating and updating your website for universal accessibility is not only an ethical imperative; increasingly it is being enforced through litigation based on the ADA.
While you can read through the W3C recommendations, WebAIM has provided a WCAG 2 Checklist that distills the recommendations into an actionable format as you scrutinize your code.
Additionally, they provide an online tool for evaluating your site in much the same fashion as you've become accustomed to when validating your HTML and CSS:
To complete this assignment, you should:
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Evaluate all pages of your midterm website against https://wave.webaim.org.
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Use Voice-Over (Mac) on a lab machine in Chrome to experience how a low or no vision person might experience your site.
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Summarize the findings of your experience with WAVE and Voice-Over, and reflect with a few paragraphs about what you woud change in your midterm website to respond to the accessibility report.
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These reflections should be posted to your midterm website as lab 6 and linked to your main labs landing page.