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GCN Home > 08/12/02 issue

Smooth the bumpy road to 508 compliance

By Steve Graves, Special to GCN

Tools with wizards, customizable rules and details for fixes can help you retrofit Web sites for accessibility

In the year since Section 508 of the Disability Act Amendments took effect, we've seen considerable advances. One is a better toolkit to make agency Web sites accessible for every user.

For this review I tested UsableNet Inc.'s Lift for Macromedia Dreamweaver Pro Suite and Hiawatha Island Software Inc.'s AccVerify and AccRepair. Their customizable rules save time by focusing only on pertinent problems. Why wade through alerts about color contrasts if the job at hand is updating the graphical images? Simply turn off all rules except the relevant one, and save the custom settings for later reuse.

Both suites have wizards that step through repairing tables, images, scripts, links and other objects for 508 accessibility.

Unlabeled images cause the most accessibility problems, so both suites incorporate tools to edit Alt tags and insert descriptions. They also can store items for reuse throughout a site.

The two suites have a similar workflow: First select the appropriate rules for a project, then run the program in verification mode to test the site.

Back comes a report with flagged objects. Run the program again in repair mode and, depending on each identified problem, follow one of the built-in wizards, fix the problem by hand, or dismiss the report as a false positive or irrelevant.

In my tests, both suites could accurately evaluate and repair data tables--something no product could do well just a year ago.

The wizards made it a snap to add captions and summaries, convert table data tags to header tags, assign unique IDs to cells and bind cells to appropriate header cells. Both suites could handle the scope and axis of a complex data table.

UsableNet's Lift for Macromedia Dreamweaver Pro Suite comes in desktop and enterprise versions. The Lift extension for Dreamweaver UltraDev verifies and repairs files on the local drive or on a local network. Because the extension is tightly integrated with Dreamweaver, you can either repair files with native Dreamweaver editing or use Lift's wizards.

More news on related topics: Product Reviews, Section 508, Web Strategies