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Accessibility Checking... With Just A Browser!
Guideline 2. Don't rely on color alone.
Not everyone has the same level of colour perception, so if you use colour to suggest meaning, your users may face difficulties. For example, perhaps you had this great idea that normally links would be green, but really important links would be red. What happens if someone with red/green colour blindness tries to use your site? They see both types of links as having equal importance, that's what.
So, don't use colour alone to give anything significance, as it may be lost. On top of that, if people actively choose to suppress your chosen colours you will be equally stumped (or rather, the user will). Here's how you can suppress colours in Opera 6:
File > Multimedia > Page Style > Author mode > Page fonts and colors
Example (links):
Becomes:
It’s hard to tell which is the more important link once the colours have been suppresssed (well, apart from the fact that it says 'this is an important link'!).
Guideline 3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly
A document should be written such that the structure and presentation of that document are separate. This means that you do not put the dreaded <font> tag around a heading or, even worse, make normal body text appear to be a heading by using <font size="7"><b>This is a heading</b></font>. You should use mark-up as it was intended to be used, hence a level one heading is <h1>This is a heading</h1>, a quote is placed in a <blockquote>, and so on.
This is a whole topic in itself, but we'll assume that you get the basics of the concept. What this means is that without an associated style sheet, a document still reads correctly and is structurally sound.
In Opera you can disable style sheets easily through the following:
File > Preferences > Page Style > Author mode > Page style sheet
By unchecking the the 'Page style sheet' you can ascertain just how much of the styling of the page has been applied at page level and how much has been performed with style sheets. What you are looking for, ideally, is a page that reverts to almost zero style when this is disabled - a case of 'less is more'.
Take a look at how the BBC site looks with style sheets disabled.
Take a look at a completely style sheet-driven site for comparison (this example is Zeldman.com).
Guideline 4. Clarify natural language usage
Okay, this is not one you can check in Opera. This is a checkpoint that can only be tested with a screen reader that is capable of pronunciation in different languages, so we'll skip on to the next checkpoint where Opera can help us once more.