ptg16476052620 LESSON 22: Designing for User Experience
Validating Your Sites for Accessibility
There’s no reason to rely on luck when it comes to determining whether your site mea-
sures up when it comes to accessibility. Just as you can use the W3C validator to verify
that your HTML files are standards compliant, you can use a number of validators to
check your site for accessibility problems. Cynthia Says is one such validator, and you
can find it at http://cynthiasays.com/. It can validate a site against the Section 508 guide-
lines mentioned earlier or against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by
the W3C.
Its operation is nearly identical to that of the HTML validator provided by the W3C. If
you submit your page to the validator, it generates a report that indicates which areas of
your page need improvement, and it provides general tips that can be applied to any page.
Figure 22.2 shows a Cynthia Says report for InformIT.If you don’t want to do a full-scale validation, you can use the WCAG (Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines) conformance levels to evaluate your site yourself. You can read
more about the conformance levels at the W3C: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.FIGURE 22.2
An accessibility
report generated by
Cynthia Says.