4.3.2 Accessibility 

Care has been taken to make the interface as accessible to all users. All of the images and 

links carry appropriately informative  alt  information. The only table used on the site is 

used  for  representing  the  results  of  the  query  on  the  main  database  and  it  is  properly 

structured, with a caption and table headers indicating column titles.  

The layout was tested for accessibility with the Bobby validator. It does not completely 

validate (i.e. qualify for  AAA  status) according to the W3C Web Content Accessibility 

Guidelines.  The  validator`s  main  complaints  were  related  to   using  colours  to  convey 

important  information      this  refers  to  the  alternating  row  colours  in  the  queries.php 

results table. In response to this, an extra column was added to the left of the table to spell 

out, as explicitly as possible, which row is which out of how many in total.  

In addition, the site was tested with the JAWS screen reader from Freedom Scientific. It 

is difficult to evaluate the success of the test simply because I am not used to navigating 

web pages guided only by a synthesised voice, but the synthesiser seemed to handle the 

site and the tabular data satisfactorily. 

4.4 Summary 

Implementation  of  the  design  specifications  was,  by  and  large,  successful.  Two 

completely  separate  scripts  were  developed,  one  in  PHP/MySQL  and  the  other  in 

PHP/XML. The system as a whole functions well together and serves at least as a basis 

for a real world application. 

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