W3C WCAG Compliance
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Web Content Accessibility Compliance

This project focusses on test web pages for compliance with the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG). This project focusses on examing the state of compliance among categories of websites with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG.

Task

Organise the sites that you intend to report on into categories. Categories may include govenment, universities, law firms, UK shopping sites, Irish schools, Hobby sites, Disability Action sites etc. Then visit these sites and measure the amount of compliance with the law as it stands. Manual checking is the best but automated tools such as below can also help. Two sites that can be used to check for compliance are:

Bobby Online Portal - This free service will allow you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG.

The Cynthia Says portal educates users in the concepts behind Web site accessibility. The Cynthia Says portal provides feedback to users in a reporting format. Accessibility issues are detected within web sites from Web-based applications, dynamic pages, or static HTML pages. Users get an immediate status of their Web site accessibility. To find these, Cynthia Says™ utilizes HiSoftware’s AccMonitor Server technology, through which USER Agents (crawlers/scanners) collect individual page or dynamic page accessibility data. This information is then sent to the central server where actual accessibility verification is performed. The output is returned immediately to the user's browser. The Cynthia Agent tests your page against programmatic test groups for Section 508 or W3C WCAG 1.0 Accessibility Guidelines.

Further Information available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/508standards.htm
http://www.isocdisab.org/about.htm
http://trace.wisc.edu/world/web/

Read this interesting paper on Web Accessibility and Design: A Failure of the Imagination.