Raakt - The Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit

Raakt is a web accessibility analysis tool that makes it easy to integrate basic accessibility evaluation early in the development process. This means that you will save time (and money) as basic technical accessibility issues can be caught automatically as part of your automated test procedure.

What separates Raakt from other accessibility evaluation tools is that only Tests that are machine verifiable are included. This means that Raakt can be used by developers with limited web accessibility knowledge. When you do your expert accessibility evaluation, they can focus on issues that need manual assessment.

I had the pleasure of presenting Raakt at the first European Rails conference in London 2006.

Paste the code below into a text file (Some free advice: don’t name your test file “raakt.rb”). This will do a simple test of a remote web page:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'
require 'raakt'
 
agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
page = agent.get("http://www.peterkrantz.com")
 
raakttest = Raakt::Test.new(page.body)
result = raakttest.all
 
if result.length > 0
  puts "Accessibility problems detected:"
  puts result
else
  puts "No measurable accessibility problems were detected."
end

Getting started with Raakt is easy:

• Installing the Raakt gem.
• Calling Raakt from the command line. A simple script to test remote websites.
• Afraid of installations? Try out the online version.

Raakt is meant to be part of your automated HTML unit tests (or acceptance tests or functional tests or what you call them).

• Java: Using Raakt in Watir, HTMLUnit, Selenium.
• ASP.NET: Watir, NUnit, Selenium.
• Ruby on Rails: Custom assert in Rails functional test, Selenium.
• PHP: Watir, Selenium
• No framework: Folder monitoring for GUI developers who produce static html documents. Batch testing an entire site as part of an automated build and deployment framework or regular quality assurance.

Would you like to use Raakt in an environment not listed here? Please file a feature request at Rubyforge.

To learn more about Raakt, see:

• Test overview and how Raakt tests map to other evaluation methodologies.
• Rdoc documentation.
• The source code.

• Stumped? Frequently asked questions may help you.
• Found a bug? Patches for bugs are always welcome. If you want to report a bug, please use the Rubyforge issue tracker for Raakt.
• How to get in touch with me? Send email to peter dot krantz at gmail dot com. I would love to hear about how you are using Raakt.