Testing for Accessibility

  • You should test your site with automatic tools (like axe DevTools, ARC Toolkit, WAVE, ...). 1
  • In additon you should manually test your sites to find errors that automatic testing tools do not find.
    • To do so you can:
      • Go through the WCAG Guidelines and analyse the sites of your website agains the criterias.
      • Test the accessiblity and usability by:
        • Only navigating with the keyboard.
        • Using different screen-reader and browser combinations. (for example VoiceOver with Safari, NVDA with Firefox, Chrome or Edge, Talkback on Android)
        • Using the site zoomed-in and -out to see if everything scales as expected and that your site does not scroll in two directions as long as the viewport is wider than 320 CSS-Pixels for vertical scrolling and 256 CSS-Pixel high for horizontal scrolling.
        • Using a different font size (configured in the browser), to see if the font size scales up or down, as expected.
        • Using high-contrast modes of different operating systems/browsers.
        • Emulating vision and color deficiencies (for example with the Chrome Dev-Tools).
        • Disable CSS to see if your website works and is well structured.
        • Validate your HTML to see if it is fully parsable.
        • Check the heading structure
  • These tests should also be part of your development flow.
  • Last but not least, you should test your sites with real users with disabilities. These tests are very similar to typical usability tests with real users. 1

Sources 

  • Smashing Magazine: Testing Sites And Apps With Blind Users: A Cheat Sheet by Slava Shestopalov & Eugene Shykiriavyi
  • 6 things I check on every website I build by Manuel Matuzović
  • Created at: 04.08.2023, Last updated at: 26.04.2024