QUAIL Manual

Submitted by kevin on Tue, 2009-12-08 10:46

Overview

Web accessibility is the ability for people with disabilities to use and access the web equally as well as people without disabilities. Developers, content editors, and administrators of websites should care about accessibility for three very good reasons:

  • Moral It's the right thing to do. People with disabilities have the same right to content and information as folks without disabilities.
  • Legal Laws like the Americans with Disabilities act either require websites to be accessible, or open the avenue for being sued if a website is inaccessible.
  • Selfish If you count all the disabilities together, people with disabilities constitute roughly 20% of web users. That's 20% of potential customers, readers, or ad-clickers. That's a number that's hard to ignore.

Unfortunately, making content accessible is not the first thing people learn when they start to write HTML, and reporting on the accessibility of a page or site to see where problem-areas are requires specialized software. QUAIL is an open-source library which gives developers the tools to assess content for accessibility so that issues can be addressed and content creators can be immediately made aware of problems. QUAIL provides:

  • A strong set of tests. There are over 200 tests for things like images missing "alt" attributes or headers being used inappropriately.
  • Flexibility. Developers can customize their own guidelines (a collection of tests) easily, and tools are available to write additional tests.
  • Integration. QUAIL was written while the developer was also working on integrating it with open-source content management systems, and lessons from that process means it's written with CMS and other content system developers in mind.
  • Speed. Unlike other open-source accessibility tools, there's no database to touch or complex regular expressions. It's 100% code.
  • Deep DOM Integration. QUAIL is all about the DOM. THis means we can recreate pages with highlighted errors and perform other magic.

Resources

Use the sub-pages of this manual to learn how to quickly get started with QUAIL: