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Frequently Asked Questions

What can the eAccessibility Checker be used for?

The eAccessibility Checker automatically detects barriers the in your web page and gives you immediate feedback.

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What is a barrier and why should I care?

A barrier is an obstacle which is challenging or impossible to overcome for some users, such as having the only entrance to a building through staircases, preventing a person in a wheelchair to enter the building. Poorly designed web sites may also contain barriers. As an example, some web sites are designed in such a way that users are required to use a mouse to navigate within the web site. People who have challenges with using a mouse, such as some people with motor impairments, or mobile phone users, will experience this as a barrier and may not be able to use the web site at all. An accessible web site is barrier free and works for all users, even users with special needs, such as users who are visually impaired, dyslexic, colour blind, are using a mobile phone to navigate etc. If your web site is barrier free, more people can use your web site. 

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Can the eAccessibility Checker find all barriers?

No, the eAccessibility Checker can not find all barriers. It can only detect barriers which can be detected automatically (around 20%). For a complete overview of barriers on your web site, a manual evaluation is required. However, due to the high level of detail, a manual evaluation of web accessibility takes much more time and effort than an automated assessment. Only a small number of pages can be tested by one person. In contrast, automated checks can cover all much larger number of web sites and a also a larger number of pages per site. The process can run with a minimal amount of human supervision. The low cost allows more frequent re-assessments of the web sites.

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What can I do to improve the accessibility of my web site?

Start out by checking one page on your web site using the eAccessibility Checker (e.g. the main page of your web site). Try to update your web site by removing the barriers detected. Some issues might require changes in the work flow of content production (e.g. training the editors to produce more accessible content). While other issues have to be addressed by the web site developers (e.g. changing from layout tables to a flexible CSS layout). You can also get more feedback from an accessibility consultant. And last but not least, listen to the users of your site and provide a way for them to report any problems they encounter. In general, the lower score you get with the eAccessibility Checker the more accessible your web page is.

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What is UWEM?

UWEM means "Unified Web Evaluation Methodology" and it is an European methodology for conformance evaluation and large scale benchmarking. It is developed by the WabCluster, the Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster which is a cluster of European projects established to develop a harmonized European methodology for evaluation and benchmarking of web site accessibility. Read more on http://www.wabcluster.org/.

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What is WCAG 1.0?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 are guidelines intended to explain how to create accessible web content. For more information read the WCAG overview.

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Why is there the need for UWEM when WCAG exist?

Even with the same set of guidelines, checking a web site’s accessibility can be carried out in different ways. Therefore there has been a need to develop the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) to ensure that evaluations are compatible and coherent with the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) part of the broad-reaching Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

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Why is the result from the eAccessibility checker different from other evaluations such as norge.no?

The eAccessibility Checker evaluates only one page, and is evaluating according to UWEM. Both norge.no and eGovMon approaches have selected a subset of all possible indicators of web accessibility. There is some overlap but the emphasis is put on different parts. Only the accessibility component of the norge.no percentage score should be considered in the comparison because usability and content are not covered by eGovMon. In norge.no a higher percentage corresponds to better accessibility whereas in eGovMon it is the other way around: a high percentage corresponds to a high number of potential barriers and thus to poor accessibility. More information is available in Comparison between eGovMon and norge.no (PDF in Norwegian)

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What is EARL?

The Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) is a language vocabulary to express test results from web accessibility results. It is intended facilitate the exchange of test results between Web accessibility evaluation tools in a vendor neutral and platform independent format. The EARL reports are not intended to be directly human readable.

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I get score 0 from the eAccessibility Checker. Does this means my web page is completely barrier free / accessible?

This may not be the case. No barriers detected by the eAccessibility Checker (score 0) means there was no barriers detected using the automatic tests. There may still exist barriers which the eAccessibility Checker could not detect. For a verification that you web page is completely barrier free / accessible, manual tests performed by an accessibility expert is needed in addition.

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