Week 11 Activity 4.1 - Evaluation Methods

I have done some testing of a few different resources using a few different methods.

1. I downloaded the Fujitsu Web Accessibiity Inspector and the Fujitsu Color Doctor and tested the website for the school where I work and an online elearning resource library that we produced as part of our outreach programme.

2. I tested the resource I made for the week 10 activity using the W3C Markup Validation Service to evaluate the resource and compared those results to the ones resulting from the Fujitsu Web Accessibiity Inspector.

I have used the W3C online validation to check website code in the past, it was easy to use and online content can be checked by entering the website URL or uploading files directly. There is also a CSS checker for external style sheets. It does a good job of checking that the code that is used is compliant to W3C standards. The tool highlighted a couple of small issues with my code which I was able to correct easily and then my week 10 activity passed the minimum accessibility requirements and I was presented with the code to add a W3C Compliance logo to my webpage.

I found the Fujitsu tools on the W3C WAI pages in their list of tools. They are free to download and use and were released in 2008. I chose to look at these because they were the most recent software releases in the list of recommended tools by the W3C. When I ran the same week 10 activity page through the Fujitsu Accessibility Inspector it alerted me to many more potential issues than the W3C validator had done. One of the issues it highlighted was that the colour I have used for headings and sub-headings is not considered significantly different in contrast to the page background and may cause problems for visually imparied users. The code that I had written was technically correct and I was impressed that it was actually checking for color contrast and so on. I shall be using this tool in the future.

The fujitsu Color Doctor gives you a visual representation of how a web page, including the graphics, would look according to different types of colour blindness. This was interersting as it gave me a visual representation of some of the colour/contrast issues highlighted by the Accessibility Inspector.