How to Interpret an AccVerify Report
FAQ
Please follow these links to common questions regarding AccVerify Reports
Questions
- What are AccVerify Reports?
- What are automatic checks? How are they different from manual checks?
- What reports does the AccVerify generate?
- Why are there so many reports after I run verification? Do I need to be familiar with all the types?
- Can I reduce the size of the reports?
- What is the overall summary report?
- What is the summary report?
- In the summary report, what is the Visual Verification Summary.?
- What is the statistics summary report?
- Where do I find the report on accessible Images?
- Where do I find the report on accessible Tables?
- Which report has information on Objects and Applets?
- Which report has information on Forms?
- Which report has information on Frames and Scripts?
- What is the Link Summary?
- What are the passed and failed file reports?
- What are the Site Quality Reports?
- What is the File Type Report?
- What is the Link Error Report?
- What is the Verify Data Table Report?
- What is the Link Phrase Report?
- What is the Max File Size Exception Report?
- What is the Repetitive Anchor Text Report?
- What is the NOSCRIPT Missing Report?
- What is the TITLE Element Error report?
What are AccVerify Reports?
AccVerify generates a comprehensive list of accessibility problems, which are grouped into various reports. Depending on the options and the accessibility guidelines selected, AccVerify generates reports which list the errors and/or warnings found in the selected files. It also marks locations which should be visually verified.
What are automatic checks? How are they different from manual checks?
Automatic checks refer to the inspections of certain features in a page that can be determined via html code present in each page. Automatic checks would include checking the following: alt-text, title in pages, repetitive links, and nonscript elements. All these checks are performed by AccVerify. In addition, checks like availability of skip navigation and plug-ins can also be set globally in AccVerify to be an automatic check. Note: Ask your administrator what types of checks your department is required to do.
On the other hand, manual checks refer to checks that designers and/or evaluators of websites should perform (e.g. inspect each page manually), looking for and checking for certain accessibility features. These include looking for the accessibility of documents in other formats besides html (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc), looking for color coded information in files, looking for high contrast between text and background, etc.
What reports does the AccVerify generate?
AccVerify generates several accessibility reports about the evaluated sites. These include the Overall Summary Report, the Summary Report, Statistic Summary Report, Passed and Failed files report and the Site Quality Report.
Why are there so many reports after I run verification? Do I need to learn all the types?
AccVerify generates a report for each file checked and provides summary reports to give an overview of the site’s accessibility. In addition, it provides results using different parameters. For instance, it groups results according to the error generated (file type, Link phrase, etc), and as passed and failed files.
As you become more familiar with AccVerify and accessibility techniques, you are likely to develop your own strategy for analyzing the results, which could use a subset of these reports. Until then, look at the results for the first file verified. If the file has passed, check it for visual verification. If it has failed, read through the checkpoints until you get to one that failed. AccVerify identifies the locations of Web elements that failed verification. Look for the elements that failed verification, repair them, and then move on to the next checkpoint.
Can I reduce the size of the reports?
Yes! Go to Settings -> Report Settings. Go to the tab Report Detail. In the Report Detail options, click the option Show only checkpoints that have a failure or warning result. In the Checkpoint Detail area, select Show only the detail items I select in the report, and click to see the locations of only the failed accessibility checks. This reduces your report to failures only. If you would like more details, you could select the different options to show elements which have a warning level and those which require visual inspections.
What is the overall summary report?
This is the first report that is displayed in your screen after running verification in Acc-Verify. This report includes a pie chart in which the percentages of passed and failed files are displayed. This chart refers only to the accessibility checks performed by the software, e.g. the automatic checks (i.e., only the ones set in the project or global setting of AccVerify).
The graphs are used to visually show the percentage of files that failed versus the percentage of files that passed. The Overall Summary provides the user with a quick straightforward overview of their accessibility status without having to go into the separate reports.
For example, if the chart tells you that 20% of your pages failed and 80% passed; it means that 20% of your pages failed automatic checks and 80% passed. This chart does not tell you anything about the manual checks which you will have to do “by hand” with all the pages.
What is the summary report?
Besides presenting the same pie chart in the “Overall Summary Report”, the Summary Report provides graphics with information about the level of failure of the guidelines checked (if any). Each of the guidelines checked are indicated by checkpoint numbers (related to each guideline). To see what each checkpoint relates to in AccVerify, go to: Settings->Accessibility Rule Settings and look for a specific checkpoint. Accessibility guidelines are grouped as visual and non-visual, and a graphic summary is provided for each type.
In the summary report, what is the Visual Verification Summary?
This summary lists the files containing HTML elements identified through automated checks that require visual verification to determine accessibility. However, all files should be verified visually, in addition to any automated remediation to ensure compliance to all checkpoints.
What is the statistics summary report?
This report shows lists of components present in the site evaluated. Those lists include summaries of images, forms, frames, tables, objects, scripts, applet links, and other elements that can be programmatically verified. Note that this is not a comprehensive summary, and omits some accessibility checking guidelines like noscripts, title elements, etc. Details of some of the summaries generated are given below.
Where do I find the report on accessible Images?
This lists the number of images located in the site and whether they do or do not have an alternative text tag. It will also show if the alt tag is blank (alt=" ") or null (alt="") and the file type of these images.
Where do I find the report on accessible Tables?
Tables used to present data are required to be accessible. Data tables should have a summary and a caption. When reporting Data Tables, this report will locate tables that have been modified by AccRepair, a plug-in for AccVerify, and have the data table comment tag in them.
Which report has information on Objects and Applets?
These results show the number of objects and applets on your site and list the ones that do not have the appropriate accessibility elements.
Which report has information on Forms?
Forms found in the site are listed here. Forms need either a label, or alternate text to make them accessible. Additionally, tab indexes and access keys can assist with accessibility.
Which report has information on Frames and Scripts?
Frames found in the site and I-frames (Inline Frames) are listed here. The Script summary shows pages using Script Elements without NOSCRIPT.
What is the Link Summary?
This shows a listing of links to non-HTML files that may be found in your web, including the doc, mp3, mpg, pdf, ppt, swf, xls formats.
What are the passed and failed file reports?
The passed files report provides a list of each file that passed the automatic verification performed by the software. Remember that these files still need to be verified manually.
The failed files report generates an individual report for each file that failed the automatic checks and displays guidelines that were not passed. HTML code is given at the end of each individual report so that you can inspect what and where the error is. If you select a file in this list, the verification checklist will appear for that particular page so that you can view the checkpoints that failed.
The failed files are files which have failed one or more of the Section 508 guidelines. These need to be corrected if the website has to comply with the Section 508 guidelines.
What are the Site Quality Reports?
These reports give you a detailed view of the different types of documents you have on your site, such as links, data tables, anchors, noscripts and titles.
These are not part of the 508 guidelines. Thus technically it is not required to comply with them. But it is a good practice to incorporate the suggestions made in these reports into the website for improving accessibility.
What is the File Type Report?
This report displays all the formats of the files that you have on the Web (other than html). This is very useful for knowing which types of documents people are putting up on the web and gives some insight on the plug-ins that are necessary. Common types of files that you can encounter in this report are: Word, Excel, PPT, PDF, MP3, etc. You can find a complete list of plug-ins at our website: http://www.cew.wisc.edu/accessibility/hisoftware/extensions.htm/. This feature does not verify those files in the link report file extensions; it creates a report of their location.
What is the Link Error Report?
This report provides a list of links that are broken (e.g. links which for some reason do not go anywhere), or they link to pages that do not exist anymore. This is very useful for webmasters to go back and check those links and pages and update them. It will not generate this report if verifying files locally or over the network.
What is the Verify Data Table Report?
This report provides a list of files that contain data tables. AccVerify uses information like the number of rows or columns to decide whether the table is a data or a layout table. It “guesses” that data tables will not be nested, and will contain greater than n rows or columns, where n is entered by the user. The user can also check options to specify that tables containing the IMG element, the HR element, or control elements are layout tables.
That is, it determines layout tables based upon the Table Verification Settings available from the Settings menu and comment tags placed by the AccRepair table utility.
What is the Link Phrase Report?
This report presents a list of files that contain links that need to be relabeled by more descriptive ones. For example, links such as “click here” or “more information” are not very descriptive –especially if more than one of these links is used in a single page. When a screen reader views your web pages, it is common for the screen reader to list all the hyperlinks on the page. If several links are all reported as Click Here, then it is much more difficult for the end user of assistive technology to discern the page.
What is the Max File Size Exception Report?
This report shows a list of files that exceed 100 KB (default) per page. This information will become relevant for downloading purposes as pages bigger than 100 KB could cause some problems. You can also customize the size of file that you want to check. In order to do that in AccVerify, go to Settings->System->System Settings and go to the Max File Size tab and specify the new setting.
What is the Repetitive Anchor Text Report?
This report shows files with one or more repeating anchor texts pointing to different locations. For example you may have two links on your page that say "More Information". If each one points to a different page or resource, then you should correct the links to make them point to the same resource, or change the text of the hyperlink.
What is the NOSCRIPT Missing Report?
The NOSCRIPT element is a tag in html that displays alternative content only if the browser does not use JavaScript or other scripting languages or for those occasions where the user has purposely disabled script. This report is useful for Webmasters and for people familiar with html. If scripts are used on your page, then the NOSCRIPT element is strongly recommended to provide information or content to those users not supporting script.
What is the TITLE Element Error report?
This report shows links to files that have duplicate titles, or pages that have no title at all. The TITLE element should be unique to each web page as it serves as an identifier for the Web.