Check that your pages are accessible! Remember that you need to check all aspects of your website:
There is no easy way to check every aspect of your website. Knowing what to do before the authoring process starts and following the guidelines, does help a lot. Checking the products by viewing them with a range of browsers on different computers of at least two platforms, PC and Mac, also makes sense.
The checking of code does not guarantee that the use of it has been wise, only that it is syntactically correct. Two validators which are available online are recommended: Bobby, from CAST and the HTML Validator from W3C. Check out some samples of results gained by having various sites checked by both Bobby and the W3C Validator. What is really important is that the web pages pass the subjective tests prescribed. You may be interested to see how a page which does satisfy the code checkers can nevertheless be inaccessible.
My recommendation is that unless there is a high expectation that there will be very little wrong with a webpage, it is almost a waste of time to try evaluating and reporting on the accessibility of a page in comparison with doing a cleanup and repair exercise immediately. For this process, I recommend starting with HTML-Tidy, followed by checking with iCAB and then checking with Bobby and HTML Validator including doing the subjective tests.
Copyright Liddy Nevile 19 March 2001. This material may be copied if source is acknowledged.