SortSite

Transcription

Welcome to this presentation on the basics of SortSite. My name is Greg Krous, University IT Accessibility Coordinator at NC State University. So what is SortSite? SortSite is a tool for evaluating the accessibility of web pages. It'll let you evaluate an individual web page, or you can scan in an entire website and get a report on the accessibility of all the pages within a site. It will also check for things like coding errors, usability, and that you're using the proper standards. So let's talk about what SortSite is not. First, simply passing a SortSite scan does not guarantee that your site is accessible. Insuring accessibility requires some human testing to actually look for things that computers simply are not good at assessing in terms of accessibility. In SortSite, along with all the other tools like this, is not perfect. So there will be some errors it'll report that you'll need to be able to interpret correctly to understand what the real issue is. Let's talk about some basic SortSite scanning terms to help you understand how the software works. First one of the options is that you can scan an entire site. If you choose that it's going literally every page within a site. For example, if I put in the URL accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu, which is my site, it will scan every single page within that site. If you do choose to scan every page within a site keep in mind that for large sites this can take a very long time to do. So I would not recommend going and starting at the home page for the university and scanning the entire university website, because it will take a very long time, and the program will probably just lock up before it actually completes that. However you can limit that, to say that you only want to scan a folder within that site. In this case my example is I have a folder within the same accessibility site called AccessibleU. So if I make that my start page and say just scan the folder, it will only scan the items in the folder or subsequent sub folders within that. You also have the option of scanning for a single page, as opposed to spidering out to other folders within a site. So here's a couple scanning tips, whenever you're using SortSite. Every time you run a scan all scans are going to check for valid links to external sites, unless you explicitly tell it not to. The reason I point this out is this can actually add significant time to your scan as it goes out and scans each of these external sites. There are some options in there in the options menu under reports. You can set it to scan all external links. You can set it to scan only a certain number of external links or just turn off external linking. It is a good test to see that your links are valid, but it does add significant time to your test. There's also an option for scanning pages within a certain number of clicks of a given page. For instance, I could go to a certain page within my site and say only scan pages that can be reached within three clicks of this page. If you want to experiment with that option it's under the options menu in advanced. Also you can choose different rule sets to use. You can choose if you want to evaluate against the current section 508 standards, if you want to use the WCAG standards and which level of the WCAG, level A, AA, or AAA. And that's under the check menu under choose rules. So where can you get SortSite? SortSite is available in the VCL, so anyone who can log in there can use it. If you would like a personal copy of it you can contact me at [email protected]. So let's look at an example of how to use SortSite on a site. So here's the SortSite application. The application is basically just a web browser with some specialized tools in it. So here I have an address bar, and I'm going to go ahead and paste in a URL. In this case I have a site here, my Accessible University site. This is a site that consists of about four pages in total. And what I want to do is I want to scan just this folder of pages. So first just to talk about some of the options mentioned previously. If I go to the view menu and options, I see I have options for do I want to check all my external links or limit it just to the first set number of links. I'm going to go ahead and just check all external links, because I don't have that many here. Then under the advanced, here's that option where I can choose to explore the entire site or only a certain number of page from the start page and I'm just going to go ahead and just leave setting as they are. Then under the Check menu I can choose my rules. There are a lot of options in here for checking errors. I'm going to primarily look at the accessibility rules and I can choose which guidelines I want to use. I'm going to choose the WCAG 2 guidelines, and I recommend you do the same. You can choose what priority you want to evaluate against, your A, AA or AAA, AAA being the most accessible, A being the least accessible option. At a minimum you should always check against AA, but I'm going to go ahead and check against AAA, and in the report it will tell you whether a certain error is because it's failed AA or AAA, so it doesn't hurt to evaluate against a higher standard. I'm not going to worry too much about the other options but, just to show you, there are options for checking compatibility for browsers. You can do search engine optimization, and then also I'll have the standards checked in there. So I'll say OK. Now I'll just come back to the Check menu, and I'll say Check this entire folder It's basically going to go out and spider this entire site, and it says it found 60 links, which means it found links to pages within this site, and then links to external sites. So it's actually checking to make sure that my links are valid. And once it's done, I get this report. Each of those check boxes of different rules that I could have chosen are over here on the side now, and so I've got my errors, my accessibility, compatibility, standards and usability. So let's just jump into the accessibility report and see what it says. So when I click on here, I'll see there are a number of error messages it generated, and this is actually because within the site I have a particular page that demonstrates lots of bad accessibility, so it was going to generate a lot of issues. So I can just read through these. Here's one that's a fairly common one that's easy to understand. My image tags must have an alt attribute. So I can click on this triangle to open it up, and it'll give me a little bit more explanation and about why it failed that rule. It'll show me the page that it failed on, and then over here to the right, it'll actually show me the line numbers where it failed. If I click on one of those line numbers, it will actually show me in the source code where that is, and so I can see it's right here. Sometimes the line gets broken up a little bit but I just need to now go find that line in my source code. So we go back. If you want to learn more about that rule in general, it'll also show you a link to the actual guidelines. So in this case it shows me a link to the WCAG 2, and in this case it's just a A, it's not even AA, requirement. If I click on there it'll actually take me to the W3C site and I can read about this particular criteria. You can go through all of your errors and find out what the problems are. So it's important to look at the accessibility, but I'd also look at the errors to see if there are problems there as well. Again, you can just open up these little discourse triangles to find more information, for the errors, accessibility, compatibility, standards and usability. You can also save these reports, and, if you do save them, over time it will actually track the accessibility of your site and how well you've done over time, whether there have been improvements or it's gotten worse. Just to show you these tools aren't always perfect, in the accessibility section, down a little further in my list, I have an error that says, "This heading is empty", which fails a priority AAA criteria. If I open that up, it'll show me the page where it is and the line number. If I go look at that, I'll see it's a H1, and I have an image inside of it, but in the image I actually do have an alt attribute. So in practicality, assistive technology deal with that perfectly fine, so the heading isn't blank. It just has its text in the alt attribute of the image, which, like I said, does work perfectly fine. Sometimes you do see errors thrown that aren't necessarily always correct. For the most part though, SortSite is pretty accurate in what it will tell you. Again, once you go through all of these reports, just because you get rid of all your errors does not mean that your site is now totally accessible. Fully testing for accessibility requires doing more of a usability kind of test almost, where you need to actually go through and actually try to use the site. Computer testing can only get you so far, but it will point out a lot of errors that you do have.