What is accessibility testing? Guide to inclusive software

What is accessibility testing?

Accessibility is defined as ensuring that users with disabilities are able to access software services., but accessibility engineering is often underfunded for many teams. For teams who do invest resources into accessibility, continued compliance with standards requires just as much ongoing investment as ensuring stability in every other behavior of your application. Just as team’s test for software bug regressions, teams need to test for regressions in their accessibility work. This testing often includes steps like validating that your website operates correctly with screen readers, that your text and backgrounds are sufficiently high contrast, and that users can navigate your application without a mouse.

Accessibility guidelines and standards

However Website accessibility standards are a bit of a patchwork mess. The requirements for how your applications need to be accessible to users depends on where those users are when they access your app, and how your app works. In the United States, accessibility is governed both by Section 508, as well as the Americans With Disabilities Act Title III. When your user is in Canada, the relevant legislation is the AODA and the ACA. In the EU, the relevant law is the EAA.

Web Content Accessibility Guide

Arguably the best set of standards for web accessibility come from the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guide (WCAG). The WCAG aren’t legal requirements, which complicates the landscape even further, while the WCAG is daunting and comprehensive, it can be summarized into four main principles that guide how companies should think about their web content:

• Perceivable: Using one or more of their senses, users need to be able to perceive and understand your website in some significant way.
• Operable: Users need to be able to navigate through your website and UI elements, such as clicking a button with a mouse, a voice command, or other method.
• Understandable: Your website content should be readable, understandable, and digestible to readers.
• Robust: Your website’s content should be developed keeping in mind how it will work across different types of browsers, both now and in the future.

Each guideline in the WCAG entails one or more of these principles. Keeping these principles in mind when developing applications will assist you in meeting accessibility guidelines. y regularly testing your applications for how well they meet those guidelines, you’ll make your path to legal compliance as short as possible.

Arguably the best set of standards for web accessibility come from the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guide (WCAG).

How accessibility testing works

Fundamentally, accessibility testing doesn’t work any differently from any other kind of software testing. To design an effective accessibility test, you must:

1. Establish the accessibility requirements for your software.
2. Define a clear test plan to evaluate your adherence to requirements.
3. Identify which testing requirements you can automatically test.
4. Write automated tests for tests that qualify.
5. Establish test routines for tests that you can only meet manually.
6. Regularly execute both manual and automated tests.
7. Document failed accessibility requirements as software defects.
8. Fix documented defects and design tests to ensure that you don’t suffer regressions.

Outside help

One approach that many companies take for accessibility testing is enlisting outside help. The simplest form of help you can get is doing an automated scan of your website with a tool like an accessibility checker. These tools will provide a quick overview of how well a particular URL meets accessibility guidelines and call out specific rules that the site fails to meet. If you’re just starting out with accessibility testing, these external tools are a great way to kick-start your initiative. Even better, you can use these results to start writing automated tests.

If you have an extensive web presence, you might also benefit from enlisting more targeted outside help. For many companies, this comes in the form of hiring accessibility consultants. These consultants have more experience working with accessibility challenges, which will likely help your team avoid common pitfalls with accessibility initiatives.

Challenges of accessibility testing

The biggest challenge in accessibility testing is doing it. Accessibility is a large problem, even for teams with modest software footprints. Many companies aren’t willing to invest the time and resources into accessibility. The changes needed for accessibility improvements aren’t obvious to stakeholders. People who use accessibility tools comprise a small portion of your user base, so investing in accessibility doesn’t seem to provide much return on investment. Many companies choose to risk the possibility of fines for legal non-compliance instead of investing up front.

Best practices for accessibility testing

accessibility testing

The best practice for accessibility testing is simply to do it, a first step that many teams do not take. If your team is currently thinking about investing in accessibility, the first step is just to do it.

There are additional best practices you’ll want to adopt once you get started Here are some suggestions:

• Automate everything you can. Tests you don’t run don’t do any good.
• Regularly reevaluate your tests to determine if they’re still covering everything.
• Update your event monitoring systems to detect when a user utilizing assistance technology experiences a failure.
• Update your framework configurations so that shipping accessible code is the path of least resistance for your developers.

The best practice for accessibility testing is simply to do it, a first step that many teams do not take.

Every accessibility improvement is worth it

Accessibility improvements require real investments of engineering time and effort. Often, the gains from this investment will seem minimal to people watching the bottom line. But there’s good news: every improvement in accessibility is an improvement. Improving one aspect of your accessibility story is still a worthwhile investment.

And once you make one of those improvements, that’s where you should invest in accessibility testing. Those tests ensure that you don’t experience regressions that render your investment moot. Even more, those tests drive compliance with legal requirements, which will help your company avoid fines.

This post was written by Eric Boersma. Eric is a software developer and development manager who’s done everything from IT security in pharmaceuticals to writing intelligence software for the US government to building international development teams for non-profits. He loves to talk about the things he’s learned along the way, and he enjoys listening to and learning from others as well.