HTML accessibility standards

[Oscar Levin]

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone at University of Arizona Global Campus in "Learning Resources and Products" asking if I had considered remediating the PDF of DMOI to make it compliant with WCAG.  I responded that making the math in the PDF would be really complicated, but that I had a fully accessible HTML version.  A couple of days ago I received a reply that their accessibility specialist tested the HTML version (on Runestone) and it tested with errors.

I'm hoping to get more information about what sort of errors and what they used for testing.  But this directed me down the rabbit hole that is online accessibility testing.  There are lots of products out there and it seems like some give different levels of feedback.  So what I'm curious about is...

Should PreTeXt adopt an official tool for checking accessibility as part of development?  And then we can recommend that tool to authors to check for themselves.

If so, any suggestions on what to use?  So far, the WAVE  web accessibility evaluation tool (https://wave.webaim.org/) has seemed the easiest to use (I'm using the chrome extension, and clicking the button shows the page with lots of annotations).  I also tried the AXE tool mentioned int he guide, which caught the same errors, but seemed a little harder to use (confusion between free and paid versions gave me pause).

Anyone else have recommendations?  

I also tried the 

[Joseph DiMuro]

Hi Oscar. I'm thinking that their question may have been prompted by last year's Justice Department ruling, mandating WCAG 2.1 AA standards for government groups:

https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/

A little bit of web browsing led me to this page, from the Web Accessibility Initiative:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/

The page is titled Easy Checks - A First Review of Web Accessibility. Here's a quote from the page:

"These checks cover just a few accessibility issues and are designed to be quick and easy, rather than definitive. A web page could seem to pass these checks, yet still have significant accessibility barriers. More robust assessment is needed to evaluate accessibility comprehensively."

"Just a few" accessibility issues? There's a LOT of stuff on that page. :-/

My temptation here: just go with WAVE. Put a recommendation for WAVE somewhere in the Guide, with a warning that no automated accessibility checker can catch all accessibility issues. *shrug*

-Joseph DiMuro

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[Oscar Levin]

Thanks for those links.  Lots to read through.

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