General Questions

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.

For more information see the "WAI Resources on Introducing Web Accessibility".

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.

For more information see the WAI compilation on "Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site".

Currently every web page is checked with 21 HTML tests and 2 CSS tests.

The W3C offer several guidelines and techniques on how to make accessible web content.

In Norway the Delta Centre have made three guides on how to make websites accessible. These publications are in Norwegian only.

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.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are guidelines intended to explain how to create accessible web content. WCAG is a web standard from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG 1.0 were published in 1999 and WCAG 2.0 were published in December 2008. eGovMon and the eAccessibility Checker use UWEM tests, which are based on WCAG 1.0.

For more information read the WCAG overview.

The colours reflect the UWEM score and how many tests passed and failed. Red means worst score and green means best score.

Most Web sites that conform to WCAG 1.0 should not require significant changes in order to conform to WCAG 2.0, and some may not need any changes. The fundamental issues of Web accessibility are the same, though there are some differences in the organization and requirements between WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0.

See also http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/from10/diff.php for more details.

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).

This depends on when the new version of UWEM will be ready.

Send us an email at maintainer@egovmon.no with a description of the problem, the exact URL you tested and which browser you used.