Checking a webpage's Accessibilty

A technique I saw on the gov.uk website for testing whether your HTML code is structured in a manner that is presented as a "more basic view", is to remove the css and see how the page renders.

While this is best done using using a tool such the WAVE tool. My pages do not render well if the css is removed, but passes the WAVE tool.

The gov.uk website gives an estimate of how much a 3rd party would charge to perform an audit of your website. A figure of £1,300 per day is quoted. This would put an audit by a 3rd party out of reach for small government bodies such as Parish Councils.

Changes that I have made on my websites

The template for my main site has been made "accessible" as tested by the Wave tool. This page is not currently using that template (I need to recreate this page or modify it - see below). I have added extra ARIA recommendations to the template including Page Regions and menuitem rules.

As there so many pages of this website I have no intention of retro-fitting the accessibilty changes.

The Parish Coucil website has been made accessible with two alerts remaining. This is due to an issue with a "Device dependent event handler" which I am still working on. This is a feature of the W3.css Frameworks website template so if anyone else is using the same template then they will be seeing the same alerts

The main problem in the original template was related to contrast errors, these were fixed by changes to fbm.css. The other main problems were a broken link to the top of the page and WAVE did not like the link text "Links" - I changed the "Links" text to "Related Pages", which was acceptable. WAVE also didn't like adjacent links to site map, the one on the time stamp was changed to about.html

Finally, WAVE was reporting that there were no page reagions defined - <header, <main and <footer> - these were added. These are HTML5 semantic elements.