Information Technology Systems & Services
Reading a Cynthia Report
A few seconds after submitting your page to Cynthia you will be presented with a very large report. The accessibility and content quality checkpoints tested will appear in the report along with detailed reporting for those checkpoints.
Some checkpoints have been tested programmatically and the results of the test are shown as pass or fail. The individual components that comprise each check are listed.
For some checks, the report will give the result of NA, or (Not Applicable). This means that there were no elements on the test page that required testing for that check.
There are some checkpoints that require a manual test by the user. If there is no value listed in the report, then that is a checkpoint that requires the manual check.
Alt Text Quality Report
When you selected to run the Alt Text Quality Reports, those reports will appear below the accessibility reports. This option looks at the page for some common authoring tool errors or alt text creation errors. The Alt Text Quality Report reports image alt text reports:
- image alt text which contains alt text values such as the word "image" either as an individual word, or part of another word. This is flagged bcause itmight not completely describe the image it represents.
- image alt text that may have a image file extension in the alt tag such as .jpg or .gif. This can alert you to cases where the author or authoring tool may have added the image name as the value for alt text.
- where the image alt text may be less than 8 characters or greater than 80 characters in length. If the text is too short or too long, it is not as helpful.
- when you might be repeating words in your alt tag more than six times per image. Sometimes, authors may add keywords to their image alt tags in an attempt to trick the search engines into providing a higher rating for the page.
File Source for Accessibility Failures
When you check to "include file source on accessibility failures", the source code of the page tested will appear in the report at the bottom. The line numbers used in the accessibility and alt text quality reports will appear on the left side.