Page Accessibility Labs

Accessibility testing, if considered at all by website managers, is usually limited to automated accessibility testing. A simple Google search will come up with hundreds of articles discussing why this is simply not enough. But most solutions on offer beyond that rely on able bodied 'specialists'. 

Page Accessibility Labs has been relying on handicapped, 'target audience' testing to assess accessibility and usability since the beginning. According to this BBC article,  someone in the UK gotten the message.

One thing is certain, however. To be sure that your site is accessible and usable, there is no real alternative to target audience testing.

 Britain's Disability Rights Commission (DRC) has is on the warpath. It has called for disabled internet users to file and actively peruse claims against owners of websites which are inaccessible in a new campaign. "It will be a part of our marketing to encourage people to ring us and complain," according to the DRC.

 The DRC has also launched a new guide for web development which adds to the W3C guidelines. According to The Register, "Most notable is the guide's insistence that the automated testing most website owners do to ensure accessibility is inadequate. The DRC asserts that it is vital that disabled people are used to test a site."

Making a website accessible doesn’t need to be expensive. In fact, if it taken into account from the design phase of the project, it doesn’t need to add any costs. This is because W3C and Section 508 accessibility guidelines don’t call for extra pages or areas of a site, they don’t call for expensive technologies, or high bandwidth “disabled user specific” solutions. Most of what the guidelines do call for are the inclusion of code elements which make your pages understandable to a broader range of technologies; design considerations, such a simple navigation structure, that improve the user experience for all users who visit your site; and making sure information and site features are available to users with older systems. These are not onerous requirements.

In the real world, a company may well want an accessibility specialist consult on the design of their web presence and they may want independent testing and verification of the site’s accessibility once built. And, of course this will add some cost to the project. A general rule of thumb is that these could add up to about 5%.