New tools in the making: Accessibility Analysis in Rails

I am working on an accessibility analysis kit which you will be able to use as part of an automated test procedure in Ruby on Rails. RAAKT is a Ruby port of PAAKT (the Python Accessibility Analysis Kit) and can be used for assessing basic accessibility of HTML documents.

Currently I am working on an accessibility analysis kit which you will be able to use as part of an automated test procedure in the Ruby on Rails framework. RAAKT is a Ruby port of PAAKT (the Python Accessibility Analysis Kit) and can be used for assessing basic accessibility of HTML documents. The focus is on machine measurable aspects which means that there is a huge disclaimer with regards to content. Just because you pass all tests in RAAKT does not mean you are completely accessible. It will, however, be possible to get a feel for basic accessibility issues in your web application. The idea is to make it possible to integrate RAAKT into your automated functional testing framework.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 10:49 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments

  1. Coda Hale says at 2006-07-03 18:07:

    Oh, super-sweet. That’ll mesh nicely with my plugin, responsible_markup, which has checks for markup validity, doctype, content type, XML prolog, overly long style attributes, inline Javascript, and others.

    Moving this level of QA into the functional tests has been great for me. Every time I’m tempted to be lazy with the markup, my tests explode.

  2. Jesper Rönn-Jensen (justaddwater.dk) says at 2006-07-03 20:07:

    Very nice idea. Cant wait to use it! Let me understand tis correctly: The tool will work as a plugin to a Rails application to test accessiblity on that Rails app?

    Or is it the other way around: A Rails app that you feed with a URL to evaluate accessibility on one or more websites?

  3. Peter Krantz says at 2006-07-03 22:07:

    Jesper: I am thinking you could use it both ways. The core component will be a gem which you install. The gem has methods to check arbitrary HTML documents (e.g. stuff you send it from your assert_basic_accessibility in your functional test). This means that it would be very simple to set up a service (which I am planning as well) to check remote sites.

  4. Jeremy Seitz says at 2006-07-06 07:07:

    This sounds awesome, I would love to see this project progress. I am very interested in beta testing — it will be interesting to see how a site that passes basic accessiblity through automated testing performs in real-world use.

  5. Michael Ward says at 2006-07-13 13:07:

    6 months between posts -good to know you’re still here!

    The kit for RoR should help nicely.

  6. Peter Krantz says at 2006-07-13 16:07:

    Michael: Hey, it is only four months since my last post! And I have been busy over at peterkrantz.com while trying to raise a baby at the same time.

Peter Krantz, peter.krantz@giraffe.gmail.com (remove giraffe).