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
- To do so you can:
- 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