A Quick Guide on Accessibility Testing

How much time have you spent in a day using your smartphone or laptop or PC? If the answer is more of your time then it is because a study reported that a person spends an average seven hours a day using technology.

Accessibility testing is considered as a subset of the usability testing which takes both the users into consideration with and without disabilities. In general, it is focused more on testing software, mobile applications, and websites. The quality analyst performs the same tests as they will for the usability testing but while considering the tools and software people with disabilities can be used.

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Accessibility testing is to make sure that computers and smart devices are used by all regardless of age or ability. We don’t really want anything to miss out on the digital era. It is the priority for every individual to make sure that each new digital component of our daily lives is easily accessible by mankind along with the physically disabled humans.

What is WACG?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WACG) puts together the efforts of different teams and people of the website or a mobile app as both the design and development should become ideally compliant to those guidelines to meet the expectations. We can expect a website to be fully responsive and better effects like counters, parallax effect, and motion elements in order to represent the brand. A mobile application should be designed to add values to the users by giving some extra than the website.

There arise a few questions which the designers, QA, and developers should ask themselves before initiating with the stages of the project. The developers should know how to work with a screen reader and how colorblind people adjust the colors on their screens to make the testing process easier. In this article, we will discuss the basic principles of WCAG which helps to get you a little closer towards the accessibility testing.

Perceivable Information and User Interface

This principle works more towards the easy content which has everything to do with text alternatives for non-text content, captions, and multimedia options. Every image, icons, buttons, and graphics should be tagged properly and described for a screen reader to display the information in proper ways.

Videos must have subtitles and audio narrations for the vital visual content in the video. Images with the parallax or flashing effects sometimes cause nausea or epileptic attacks even though it may look good, hence the designers should take extreme care while using these elements on a website.

Operable Navigation and User Interface

It is essential for a website to be navigable and interactive though keyboard for the people who are using a text browser or are unable to use the mouse for variant reasons. Hierarchy and structure become the priority for easy navigation through the menu and related pages.

Here, the JavaScript is dialed in visual browsers and hence screen reader will not be able to see those elements. Another issue comes the login timeouts or re-authentication which takes place without any data loss or text disappearance after any ideal reading time. Here, the time should be adjusted to slow readers who need more time to fill a form or double check before confirming the transaction.

Easy to Understand Data and User Interface

Some of the things which may seem obvious are not only for text-to-speech software but sometimes the language on a website also needs to be very clear. By using the same structure and system of where the information and descriptions can be on different pages, it can help the users to learn how to navigate the website.

Other interaction and forms can be difficult and confusing for some people who can lead to errors consequently. To this, error message descriptions become essential to describe what the users have missed by correcting their mistakes.

Robust Content and Reliable Interpretation

This principle is based on the compatibility with the older, newer and upcoming accessible technology. One of the safest ways to keep this technology compatible with the various browsers and assistive technology is to make effective use of the markup language.

Can Accessibility Testing Improve the Website/App Quality?

WCAG does not really claim to cover all the issues that the disabled people may face in web content. For this reason, checking conformance to WCAG does not really prove that a website is accessible to everybody as a real accessibility evaluation should include user testing.

Not every mobile app or website needs to be completely accessible but even by making some small changes, it can enhance the overall user experience. This can feel like usability testing which is all about how easy it is to use a system in case of website and mobile apps. However, test automation is definitely improving your testing by saving you a ton of time and money. Similar to usability testing, accessibility testing can be performed in an automated way.

After all, testing is crucial in all of the development stages and cannot be skipped because the test automation can be integrated easily into any DevOps process by giving real-time feedback based on the interval tests. The earlier you figure out the bugs and make changes, the easier it is to fix them later. Keep Learning!

Author Bio:

Vikash Kumar works as a manager in the offshore software development company Tatvasoft.com. Sometimes he does have free time while managing campaigns, during which he likes to write and explore new technical trends and topics. Vikash also has published his bylines on major platforms and has been blogging since 2014. You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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