About this website

What is it?

This website pretends to be an online store for shopping clothes. Its real purpose, however, is to be a tool that can be used for various aspects regarding online accessibility, including but not limited to the following:

  • To learn about the technical sides of web accessibility like markup, style, document object model, etc.
  • To learn about related areas, such as technical recommendations, tools, and assistive technology.
  • To demonstrate the impact of accessibility measures on websites.
  • To validate accessibility audits and checkers, and to determinate false positives and negatives in particular.
  • To create empathy for people with impairments.
  • To serve as a baseline in user trials and accessibility / usability evaluations.

The tool is basically a web application, and its main feature is that it can be configured to contain or be free of accessibility errors. Accessibility flaws in turn corresponding to selected WCAG criteria.

Why you may want to use it

These are the tool’s benefits:

  • It can be used to give meaningful tasks in user trials.
  • It has a modern appearance.
  • It integrates modern web technologies such as HTML5, Javascript, and responsive design.
  • It is based on a CMS (Node), such that new content can easily be added.
  • It allows to compare a page’s accessible version with the inaccessible version.
  • It allows to turn on/off single accessibility flaws.
  • It is multilingual.
  • It is freely available as open source under the MIT licence and can thus be used and extended by anyone.

Why you may want to avoid it

We have to be honest; these are the tool’s limitations:

  • It covers currently only a few accessibility flaws / WCAG criteria and is thus not complete. We call it a prototype.

Please have a look at the tool’s settings to see which of WCAG’s criteria are covered currently.

If you would like to contribute

We invite you to contribute to this project and extend the tool. Please see the How to for use and extension possibilities.

Funding

This prototype has been developed with funding by: