What is the process of accessibility testing?

Accessibility testing provides a structured testing platform to make sure that the website or application is usable and accessible to the disabled community. It becomes a standard to ensure that the right assistive technologies are used and testing activities are carried out to make a website or application accessible and that too in accordance with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). The requirements of disabled people are taken into consideration and then scrutinized in order to make a site or application fully accessible as per web standards. In this article, you will get to know about the four steps that define the process of accessibility testing. 

What is Accessibility testing?

It is a testing method that verifies whether a particular website or application is usable and accessible or not. The key point to focus on is that disabled people should be able to easily access the website or application. Assistive technologies are used to build the application.

Following are the four steps involved in the process of accessibility testing:

1. Initiate by incorporating automation testing: The current level of a website’s accessibility can be properly evaluated through the test automation platform. Key pages are monitored and broad assessments are conducted for the whole site without the need to check every page individually.

Following is a checklist that can be used to choose the right test automation platform:

• The accessibility status is analyzed with real data

• The whole site is tested, which includes user journeys, shopping cart, login credentials and also other pages with functionality or dynamic content

• Team members consisting of legal experts, marketers, developers and project managers can easily interpret the results.

2. Code should be reviewed manually: Although web accessibility gets a great deal of work done through automated testing, but, still, all the WCAG criteria are not covered by it. Whether commercial or free automation tools are being used, only a certain level of work is covered up. A huge part of the success criteria requires the incorporation of manual review.

For example, alt text can be identified by the automated tool, but, whether the alt text is in line with the accessibility requirements cannot be ascertained by the automated testing method. 

3. Reviewing the User Experience (UX): The accessibility factors should be properly considered during the UX review. Accessibility refers to adherence to a specific set of standards such as WCAG, when a document, application or website is being created. This includes everything from text and color to multimedia and images.

The level of usability can be raised by accessibility requirements for all users, regardless of whether they are disabled or not.

4. The sheer value of user testing: User testing involves experts in assistive technologies and usability experts. Organizations across the globe know for certain that every WCAG issue cannot be detected by automation tools. Hence, to solve this pressing issue, user testing is considered to be a viable and strategic solution.

Businesses can thrive through the tactical implementation of user testing. Before a website or application is launched, the team ensures that it is able to work on any device with ease. 

Following are four key points that can be considered for launching user testing:

• Select a testing environment and bring in members who can work with disabled communities

• Experts should be bought in who can help in obtaining productive results

• Look for disabled people who are using assistive technologies

• Recruit the right testers (users).

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing accessibility testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a professionally acclaimed software testing services company that will provide you with a structured and tactical testing roadmap in line with your project specific requirements.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.