Visual Checklist

AccVerify does a good job checking web pages for 'coding' compliance. But there are a number of areas in which a webpage must meet standards that are not so easily verified by a program. These areas require the user to verify visually that each standard is met appropriately. Below is a check list of items that you should check for to ensure that your webpage meets standards.

Multimedia Presentations: 508 Standards, Section 1194.22(b):

Equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized with the presentation.

If you have an audio file that plays when the web page opens, or can be downloaded then a text transcript of the audio file must be made available. Transcripts are not sufficient for audio/video clips, they must have synchronized captioning.

Color Information: 508 Standards, Section 1194.22(c):

Web pages shall be designed so that all information conveyed with color is also avaialable without color, for example from context or markup.

You must check your page to make sure that in any place you use color to indicate a condition, action, or any other information (ie. a good match is green vs. a bad match is red, that information must also be spelled out in another way e.g. a rating in percentages, a textual context such as 'good' or 'bad'.) Using only color to convey meaning can leave out those people who are visually impaired.

Tables: 508 Standards, Section 1194.22(g & h):

Row and column headers shall be identified for data tables. Markup shall be used to associate data cells and header cells for data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers.

Many people use tables as a method of organizing a webpage. Formatting text to follow a certain layout is often much easier to achieve using tables. Tables used for this purpose can be thought of as LAYOUT tables.

Another use of tables is to present a large amount of data in a tabular format that makes it easier for a user to access one piece of data quickly out of a large number of possibilities. This would be considered a DATA table. This is relatively simple to do visually, but for the users of assistive technology it can become cumbersome if not impossible to remember which row and column one is in out of tens or even hundreds of columns and rows. By using row and column headers in these types of DATA tables it makes this task much easier to complete.

If you are using DATA tables to present information to users then you must provide row and column headers. Click to view an example of how to create appropriate data tables.

Scripts: 508 Standards, Section 1194.22(l):

When pages utilize scripting languages to display content, or to create interface elements, the information provided by the script shall be identified with functional text that can be ready by assistive technology.

Any page that uses scripts should contain the noscript element alerting users that scripts are being used on the webpage. Common use of javascripts within links is to provide rollover images or to hide the page a link opens. This effectively hides the same information from a user of assistive technology. Failure to include the noscript element when scripts are used is a checkpoint failure already.