WebCT Accessibility Interest Group

Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) and Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES)

University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign

Main Navigation Bar

Sand trail

Functional Testing for Accessibility

Keyboard Testing

Many people with disabilities can only use the keyboard to navigate links, form controls and other elements that respond to user interface events on a web page. The ability to use the interface with only the keyboard is a critical first step in making web based user interfaces accessible.

Test Condition
Disconnect the mouse from the computer or move mouse to a position the tester cannot reach.
Blackboard Functions
Make a list of all Blackboard functions that are in that are part of the Quality Assurance (QA) test
From a consistent start page use the keyboard to navigate to and activate the functions identified in the previous step, including all links, form controls and all other elements that respond to user interface events through scripting.
onChange event on select elements
From a consistent start page use the keyboard to navigate to and activate the functions identified in the previous step, including all links, form controls and all other elements that respond to user interface events through scripting.

User Styling

The ability of users to restyle content to meet their own perceptual needs is important for people with disabilities. They many need to change font sizes, font families, and/or the foreground and background colors used in rendering text to make it more perceivable to them.

NOTE: As screen resolutions continue to increase in pixel density this will increasingly become a more important issue for all users for them to adjust text sizes and colors to match the capabilities of the technologies they are using.

Disable authoring styling and layout
Configure a graphical browser to disable author styling information Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox or Mozilla or use a browser like IBM Homepage reader
Test to see if page is still usable when author styling and layout markup is disabled.
User Styling Options
Configure a graphical browser for high contrast Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox or Mozilla for high contrast mode or use a browser like IBM Homepage reader
Test to see if content restyles to the high contrast color settings
Test to see if page is still usable when high contrast styling is enabled.

Navigation and Orientation Information

Navigation is critical aspect of improving functional accessibility and needs to be tested by a human in the QA process.

Page and Tabs Uniquely Identified
Use Firefox with the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension to test if the h1 element is present and uniquely identifies the content of the current web resources. This is a problem especially in tabbed pages in Blackboard. There should be just one h1 element per page that describes.
Major Topics
Use Opera or Firefox with the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension to test heading navigation to major and minor topics on a web resource (H1-H6).
Form Labels
Use Firefox with the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension to test for form labels on form controls using the list of forms feature.
Link Text
Use Opera or Firefox with the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension with the list of links functions to identify link text that does not clearly indicate the target of a link.
Navigation Bars
Use Firefox with the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension to test for Navigation Bars with the List of Navigation Bar function. Use list markup and the title attribute to indicate navigation bars.
Course Home Link
Provide a clearly labeled link on each page of a course to take the student back to the course homepage.
Focus on expanding menu
If a menu is expanded then keyboard focus on the new page should be on the last menu item selected or the first element of the new list of menu items. Needs to be consistent.
Header Information for Data Tables
Use Firefox with the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension to test for proper heading information on data tables.

Text Descriptions

When images are used to convey information they need proper text descriptions. Image content (IMG element) should be avoided for styling purposes, for example separation bars and styling text. Background images and other CSS styling techniques should be used for creating graphical styling techniques that support user restyling content to fit their own perceptual needs or to match the technologies they are using to render web resources.

Test Condition
Disable image rendering in the graphical web browser.
Blackboard Functions
Make a list of all Blackboard functions that are in that are part of the Quality Assurance (QA) test
From a consistent start page, test that ALT text descriptions convery information and that text desctiptions are not clipped by image size boundaries or frames
Images used to stylize text should be changed to text content with CSS for styling.
Images used to create graphical effects shoulf be moved to background images or other CSS techniques to separate content from styling.