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Growth House > Technology > Web Accessibility

Accessibility for Everybody: Understanding the Section 508 Accessibility Requirements
book cover The Section 508 rules don't just touch on the Internet, they provide rules about every aspect of computer use.

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
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The 187 peer-reviewed guidelines are each rated on a 1 to 5 scale to indicate the strength of evidence supporting its hypothesis. These guidelines are available for free on the web at http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html but the book is a good reference guide.

Handbook of Usability Testing
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A practical nuts-and-bolts guide that you down to real testing right away.

Web Accessibility

This page provides links to tools that can maximize the ratings that a web site will obtain under certain automated evaluation metrics for web accessiblity.

W3C Accessibility Tools Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility

W3C HTML Validator checks for basic HTML language compliance.

W3C CSS Validator checks for style sheet language compliance.
[Check current cif.css style sheet

CSSCheck is a CSS validator.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 are the gold standard.

Accessibility tutorial by Jim Thacher gives insight into how how 508 and WCAG are related.

WebXACT checks for compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and cross-references specific sections of those guidelines to issues found on your pages. Also checks privacy issues.

UsableNetProvides a variety of tools related to accessibility by people with disabilities and compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

A-Prompt from the University of Toronto is a software tool to help developers meet varying levels of compliance, including Section 508.

WAVE lets you see the reading order of components on the page, which is helpful when analyzing pages that use tables. It checks various other factors which are of importance when using assistive devices to read web pages.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology offers a web interface to several evaluation tools that cover a wide range of technical issues in web design. The Web Static Analyzer Tool (WebSAT) checks web page HTML against typical usability guidelines.

TIDY examines many aspects of the page and detects common HTML coding errors as well as accessibility issues.

Other accessibility design issues

When using tables for layout, best approach is to keep the tables simple, such as a two-column or two-row layout.
Positioning the logo as the first component on the BODY with a link to the home page ensures that assistive device readers will have this important link listed first.
Use of navigation bars is encouraged.