Validation

Validation, as understood by ACTF, is the process of testing the degree to which the elements of a graphical structure conform to a specified set of rules or criteria. Rules might specify restrictions on various properties of elements, relations between elements, or other facets of the structure. ACTF offers a generic validation mechanism, meaning that any set of rules or criteria that can be expressed in the ACTF markup language can be used as the basis for a validation process.

ACTF specializes the validation process in two important ways:

  1. ACTF (depending on what features are installed) validates GUIs, hierarchical structures of graphical (and typically renderable), interactive components contained in the Java AWT, Java Swing, and Eclipse SWT toolkits. ACTF also validates web content that is assembled as a hierarchical structure in a web browser according to the DOM Level 2 specification.
  2. ACTF focuses on rules that embody the IBM Accessibility Checklists, a set of rules meant to measure the accessibility of GUIs and of web content. (We will return to this second specialization momentarily.)

Thus, if you wish to validate Java GUI-based applications or web content (including some dynamic web content) for accessibility using the aforementioned checklists, ACTF is ready to use. If, on the other hand, you wish to validate other structures or content according to other sets of guidelines or criteria, that work is beyond the scope of this overview. (Future releases will support more thorough documentation of this aspect of ACTF.) This document will focus on writing validation documents. See the ACTF Validation API for discussions of the necessary interfaces.