Inside the Mind of a Grader

Posted May 15th, 2006 by Jack Pickard

I became an Accessites Team Access grader the start of January this year, the “Green-Beast” himself, Mike Cherim, announced the arrival of Accessites.org as a showcase to honour great looking sites that are accessible, usable and standards-compliant. I thought this sounded quite interesting so I went to have a look. After a quick poke around the site I realised that I agreed with pretty much all of their aims so I contacted them and volunteered to join.

Mike consulted the other team members and they came back and told me they would be happy to have me on board — even though I’d not class myself as a great graphic designer — because they saw me as having fair knowledge of accessibility and being able to recognise a great looking site. Although I did have to make my site validate first. If ever you find it doesn’t, come shout at me.

So that’s what I’m doing here. I realise that grading is a subjective experience and other graders will no doubt look at things and score things differently to me. I’m also aware that I’m not perfect, and I’m far from infallible. I’m also an unpaid volunteer who is doing this just because I believe it’s a good cause. So I’ll talk you through what I’m looking for on the Grading Checklist — but I’m not going to talk about the scoring system as that’s covered elsewhere on this site.

The Grading Checklist - Part I

1. Site without styles.: The site should be usable with CSS disabled. I don’t expect it to still look good: if you’re using a browser that doesn’t support CSS you can’t expect good design but you can expect content.
2. Site without images.: Note that this is site with styles, but without images. What I’m looking for here is basically good alt text for meaningful images and recognising that decorative images should have a null alt text. If I see “dotted spacer” for a decorative image or “Obrien2e999″ for a meaningful image it will cost you points. Page layout should not be compromised by the lack of images.
3. Site without images or styles.: As far as I can tell, this is basically a combination of the first two. In general, the mark here is an average of the marks for 1 and 2: it’s rare that some image problem only crops up when styles are also disabled or vice versa — although it is possible.
4. How does the site fare with scripting disabled?: If there are no problems, you get 6. If the site is unusable, you get 0. If the site is partially usable you’ll get somewhere in between.
5. How semantic and proper is the markup?: This is probably one of the most subjective categories. I take a look at the HTML source and see if I like what I see. Does it look “clean?” Are elements such as div, span, em, and strong used correctly? Are any of them over-used? Are headers used and used properly? In the end it has to boil down to my opinion — apart from headers where it can be easier to determine mistakes!
6. How well are links marked and displayed?: What I want to find is: all text that I expect to be a link on the page should be; and I don’t want to find any links that I think look like normal text. The main things I’m looking for here are visibility and consistency. Are links grouped in lists where appropriate — including inline lists?
7. How well is hover/focus used?: I break this up into two points. Do you use hover/focus well on link text? For this I expect the selected link (whether active, focused or hovered) to stand out significantly from the others. I would also like to see hover/focus used on other elements, but I don’t consider that as important.
8. How well are block elements used?: I don’t expect all of the following to be present on a site, but I’m looking for things like forms, fieldsets, blockquotes, data tables and lists. If you’ve got none of these — or only one — it’s going to be difficult to get a top mark here. Two or more and if they’ve been used well you could be on for a good mark.
9. How well is the site machine read?: This is one of the hardest areas for me to properly mark because I don’t properly have a screen reader and I’m not a regular screen reader user so it’s very difficult for me to accurately assess how well a site would come out when read out by a screen reader. However I use a combination of Firefox’s Fangs plug-in and Opera Voice to give it my best shot. I’m obviously looking for things to make sense when read out, alt text to make sense in context and add value to the page, and importantly things to be read out in some sort of reasonable order.
10. How readable is the site?: Can I work out what you’re going on about? The easier and more pleasant to read I find it, the higher score it will get. You’ll lose marks if the text is right justified (as this may cause problems for dyslexic readers).
11. How well does the site present its purpose?: What I’m looking for here is to have a rough idea of what the organisation or person behind the site does simply from looking at the home page. Other pages should also give appropriate information. In many cases an appropriate “tag line” to your logo can be of great benefit here (assuming of course that you provide an appropriate alternative if it’s contained in an image)!
12. What is the browser support like?: I don’t personally have access to a Mac so I’m limited in exactly what I can test here. I will tend to test your site against the versions of Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer that I currently have installed on my Windows XP PC. I will also use Browsercam to investigate legacy and Mac browsers. Okay, it’s not perfect but we are a bunch of unpaid volunteers!
13. Acronyms, Abbreviations and Definitions.: I’m looking for the use of acronyms, abbreviations, definitions, quotations and accesskeys across your site. If in my opinion you use these and use them well, you’ll score highly. Note that in my opinion you do not necessarily need to use the acronym or abbreviation elements to use acronyms or abbreviations well. Simply demonstrating the first occurrence will be sufficient. On the other hand, I would expect direct quotations to be using a quote or blockquote element. If you don’t use any abbreviations, quotations, acronyms, definitions, or accesskeys then I simply can’t give you the marks for them.
14. Do you have skip links of some description?: I’m looking for skip navigation links (or skip to navigation) links to make things easier for screen readers. I’d also like to see where appropriate bookmarks and links to part way down long articles — and also links back to the top or bottom as appropriate.
15. How good is visitor support?: Do you assume all visitors are from one country? Are your styles likely to suit everyone or do you allow the user to change their style preferences? The key question is really do I think your users would benefit from the ability to have a different style? Do you specify the HTML letter direction — okay, this isn’t a major one — so isn’t likely to cost you more than 0.25 if you forget it.
16. What’s your page footprint?: In other words, exactly how much do I have to download in terms of file size in order to see your page? And how much of that is clutter, compared to how much to I benefit from? It’s a balance between content and bandwidth. And what’s your metadata like? I’d expect to see either robots metadata or a robots.txt file. I also want to know who’s written the page and when; I’d like some keywords and to see what else I can find out.
17. Site information: Like it says, I’m looking for a search facility, for a site map, for an accessibility statement, for a privacy policy, for custom error pages and an easy way to contact you. You don’t necessarily have to have all of these — I won’t insist on a site map or a search facility for a site that’s only five pages — but chances are if you’re sites that small you’ll be failing to score points somewhere else because you won’t be demonstrating something I am looking for. Also, if you have a page with “this site information” whatever you do, don’t call it a “colophon” [I never quite got that one either –Ed.]
18. How well is your site laid out?: Do I find it easy to use and pleasant visually? Have I found things where I expected to find them or have I had to search around for them?

The Grading Checklist - Part II

1. Mechanical plus Human Accessibility Checks.: I will look to find the first thing I can that breaks a particular accessibility level. Why? Because it saves me time. There’s no point me checking through fifteen passes at level 2 if I’ve already noticed you’ve failed checkpoint 3.7, and it takes enough time to grade the darn things as it is.
2. Layout method.: Pretty simple. If it’s a fixed width site, you score less. Those are the rules.
3. Language support.: Again simple. Points are only given if the site is offered in more than one language. Otherwise, nothing’s earned.
4. Rate the site’s functions and complexity.: If you have interactive forms, and something a bit more two-way than a series of pages, you’ll start to score points here. As will you with database interactivity, and clever use of server side code. I will not rate you more highly because you’re using a third party tool such as blogger. I’m only interested in the bits that you’ve done yourself.
5. Rate the style and presentation.: It all boils down here to whether or not I like the look and feel of the site. This is obviously again a very subjective mark.

And then…

I add it up, submit my checklist and wait until the site has been graded by others. The mark for your site is then averaged and your score is based on the average of each grader; and you’ll be told what level of award (if any) you’ve achieved.

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Accessites.org Inside the Mind of a Grader