One of my current projects at work is to ensure that our Web site is Section 508 compliant. This is a good thing, as it ensures that visitors with disabilities or impairments are able to access all of the content on our site. Folks with screen readers, users of alternate browsing devices, and individuals with vision problems need their Internet fix as much as the next person, and we are in the business of selling products. God knows we want to take their money right along with all the other schmoes who happen to visit.
As you might imagine, there are all kinds of tools out there designed to evaluate your Web site’s level of compliance. Most of them cost an arm and a leg. You can, however, get all the evaluation you need with a pretty simple little tool, and it’s free. It’s called Lynx; maybe you’ve heard of it.
Back in the olden days of the Internet — when Kurt Kobain was the newest teen angst idol — most UNIX terminals came with this console-based Web browser and Internet Gopher client (if you don’t remember Gopher, don’t sweat it, watch a few Love Boat reruns and get the same net effect). It did a pretty good job of serving up Web sites in text, but if you threw any funny business in there (nested tables, images without alt-tags, frames) it made for a serious mess of a page. Which was bad if you wanted to use it to browse Web sites.
But it turns out it’s good if you want to test the accessibility and backward-compatibility of a Web site. If you mind your P’s and Q’s when designing a site — read: make it W3C and CSS compliant — then Lynx assembles your site in an order that, while not exactly what your designer had intended, is still usable. As a result it’s a great make-or-break testing tool for Web sites: If it looks okay in Lynx, it’s going to (at the very least) be accessible in every other browser out there.
It does not please me to tell you that the Web site at work is most certainly not 508 compliant. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to get it into line. On the brighter side, however, the site you are viewing right now is, to quote Miles Davis, cleaner than a broke-dick dog. Thanks to Ivan Lopez’ slick design work, we look great in so many different Web browsers, we can’t keep track of them (I am, of course, referring to the Royal We).
Go ahead, try and break it. Download a copy of Lynx and surf on over. I dare you.
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