Types of Accessibility Evaluations

Automatic Evaluation

There are a variety of software tools that carry out automatic accessibility evaluations of websites.

• They are best for finding blatant violations of Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 standards on all pages throughout the site.
• The results of their evaluation require an evaluator to determine whether a true issue exists or not.
• They can miss many problems that require human judgment to interpret as a problem.

Manual Evaluation

Manual accessibility evaluations involve an evaluator going through pages (both marked and unmarked as having a problem by accessibility software tools) to check for accessibility.

Usability Testing with Disabled Users

In usability testing, users from whatever population a system (e.g., website) is being designed for are brought in to work with the system.

As good as an expert usability evaluator is at their job, it is always necessary to bring in users to see how they work with a system to determine whether it works for them or not. The same is true for accessibility, because the user group to be designed for is the disabled population.