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Richard R. Jones M.Ed., Assistant Director
Arizona State University, Main
Disability Resources for Students, 873202
Tempe, AZ 85287-3202
Phone: 480-965-1234
A-Prompt is a program that can be downloaded from the Special
Needs Opportunity Window, SNOW program at the University of
Toronto, (http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca).
The application is the best free web tool available to evaluate
and correct web pages. As of this writing, the final version has
not been released. The software will currently evaluate the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Access Initiative (WAI)
accessibility priorities one and about half of two and three (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html).
The final version should do all objectives for all priorities.
The University of Toronto says the final version will be released
in January of 2001. But even the beta version of this software is
so sophisticated that it out performs available commercial
software.
The user can change the software settings by clicking on the
"Settings" button at the lower left corner of the window. The
Settings features to include or exclude specific accessibility
objectives from any level. From the Settings menu the user can
set to automatically correct some accessibility issues. The
settings menu will place "d" links in you web page if you wish to
use a compromise for Longdesc element. The software, however, is
not clairvoyant. It requires the user to know the intent of the
various elements of the web page. If the user correctly answers
the A-Prompt questions displayed for each inaccessible element,
the software will enter HTML code to make the element accessible.
A second exception is A-Prompt cannot change a poorly designed
web page into an efficient one. If the web page was confusing
before the user runs A-Prompt, it will be just as confusing after
A-Prompt. The final exception is if the web page was created with
software that does not use "clean" HTML, A-Prompt will not be
able to correctly review and/or edit the file.
A-Prompt is meant to be included as a part of standard web
editors. For this discussion, A-prompt is used as a stand-alone
application. After the user has used Settings to set the priority
level, any automatic corrections the user wants the software to
performed, the method of saving the corrected version. It is time
to load a file.
First, the user saves a web page to a computer hard drive and
opens the file with A-prompt. The evaluation of a web page is
very quick and understandable. If the page fails A-Prompt, the
computer screen shows the objectives that are in question and a
note saying that the page has failed. There is no multi-page
summary with little relevant information. Accessibility
objectives that are not met on the page have a check box with a
red 'x". The user can click on each objective to see the specific
instances on the web page where accessibility is in
question.
As the user goes through each instance of each accessibility
objective, A-Prompt will display a description of the W3C
objective, which caused this element to be questioned by the
A-Prompt. A-Prompt then displays a series of questions the help
the software determine how best to treat the HTML element. Some
questions are designed to determine the intent of the element on
the web page. Some questions ask for a location of long
description or a printed narrative of an audio file. A-Prompt
combines the answers to these questions to "fix" the HTML
code.
To go further that this would require a description of each
objective. This short summary is just meant to convey the ease of
use this software provides. It is a tool that every web master
should download. Again, the "fix" that A-Prompt creates will only
be as good as the answers the user provides. Any page that is
pronounced "accessible" should be tested with several screen
readers to verify that it is navigable.
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