Media: Sitepoint reviews NN Accessibility Product and interviews Norman

LIFT - NN/g automates the evaluation of webpages for accessibility problems. Sitepoint carries technical editor Keven Yank's product review and an interview about it with Jakob Nielsen.

Government-affiliated sites in the US must now conform to Section 508 accessibility guidelines, while the W3C has produced its own set of guidelines for all Web designers. On top of these technical standards, notes Yank, there are plenty of things that can be done to make a site more usable for the all, as outlined in the Nielsen Norman Group's recent report: "Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities".

If you use Macromedia Dreamweaver/UltraDev 4.x or MX for your Web design work, LIFT - Nielsen Norman Group edition (LIFT - NN/g) is a powerful tool that bundles both standards and all the recommendations from the Nielsen Norman Group report into an automated tool that will blend right into your workflow.

'Unlike other tools of this type that can be tedious and inflexible, I found LIFT NN/g meshed really well with my workflow. Don't ask me how, but LIFT - NN/g is able to suggest appropriate corrections for accessibility problems based on context. For instance, it's able to tell when an image tag is a spacer image and instead of prompting for a description of the image, it offers to insert an empty alt attribute,' says Yank.

But it's not cheap and it still needs evaluating by a British outfit to ensure that there are no incompatibilities caused by cultural specifics.

The interview with Jakob Nielsen reveals some positive changes. Nielsen is recorded as saying: 'In old times (say, five years ago) there were a lot of design projects that didn't care about accessibility at all. Most project managers assumed that blind people couldn't use the Web anyway, and therefore couldn't use the specific Website that was being developed. We have now eradicated this misunderstanding, and most internet managers do know that they have to care about users with disabilities.'

Nielsen says that he is raising the priority of this issue in his promotional work and now also, reducing 'the amount of resources required to produce better designs for these users' in his new software.

Associated Link: Sitepoint: Review - LIFT Nielsen Norman Group Edition

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