Question re: testing the mobile version of our website
Hi!
I have been asked to test our special mobile phone version of our website. I have an Android (HTC Sensation).
It looks excellent, everything opens fine, all nice and zoomable etc. So I can confirm that it passes with regards to navigation.
However, I want to test that:
(a) the colours are accessible
(b) everything gets read out for blind mobile users (not just text, but form labels, ALT text for pics, etc as well).
Firstly, re: colours I usually use Colour Contrast Analyser. But obviously I can't use this on my mobile. If I test the mobile web version's colours on a PC, I assume that the colours will be the same. Or are the rules/thresholds (ie 4.5:1, 500 colour difference, etc) the same for mobiles?
The other question is about getting it read out. I have installed SpeechSynthesis, then gone into Settings, Accessibility, turned it on; then gone into Voice Output, Text-to-speech settings, and chosen the Pico TTS speech engine and the British English language pack. I can get it to read out the sample "This is an example of Speech Synthesis with Pico", but that's it. I've not been able to get it to read out any websites and I'm losing patience with it. Am I using the best app for the job?
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Hi,
With regards to colour there are no baseline recommendations. In the absence of any you can use WCAG but as you say this is a far from precise art. Something you may find useful is a recent post by Jamie Knight on colour and responsive web design: http://jkg3.com/Journal/responsive-contrast. Not exactly what you're looking for but related.
Testing on Android can be fiddly to set up but it sounds to me like you don't have the Eyes Free Keyboard installed. Talkback (and other speech output software) can't access web content unless it is done via a keyboard. If on touch installing the virtual Eyes Free Keyboard helps you work round this problem. Marco Zehe has instructions on how to do this here: http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/05/08/first-round-of-accessibility-support-for-android-in-mobile-firefox/
For more tips on testing speech output with Android and iOS see http://www.iheni.com/category/mobile/
Henny
Blog:www.iheni.com
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