CODEWITHSUNDEEP
accessibilitywcag
Alex Dahlman
Alex Dahlman

Reputation: 33

WCAG2.0 AA Test lead

Recently I've been put in charge of testing and implementing WCAG 2.0 AA compliance into our websites (php CMS based). However, my experience with this is pretty limited. My questions are:

Is Mac VoiceOver sufficient enough to test?

Should I test with JAWS on Windows instead?

Any tools besides the VO's I should be using while developing and QAing our products?

I use the Wave tool as of now to check code, but not sure if there any thing else that could help this process speed up.

Thank you for your suggestions and help. This is a big step for us and we are hoping to create a standard where accessibility and compliance is 2nd nature to us and our devs.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 173

Answers (3)

James Pizzurro
James Pizzurro

Reputation: 375

As others have mentioned, automated tools are not the be all and end all of accessibility testing, but they can definitely help you and your team cut down on the manual testing you'd otherwise be on the hook for, allowing you to spend more time on the issues only manual testing can uncover.

To that end, since it sounds like you're coming at this problem from the engineering side and are able to make changes to your codebase, Continuum might be a good solution for you. You can easily integrate it into your site's existing test suite and use the technologies you're already using to test a page for accessibility concerns. I suggest downloading one of the free sample projects at webaccessibility.com and playing around with it, but you can also dive straight into the API documentation, which includes its own Getting Started guide.

Upvotes: 0

J. Afarian
J. Afarian

Reputation: 578

I'd definitely be branching out and testing with the most common screen reader & browser combinations.

My recommendations are for the following combinations:

  1. JAWS + Internet Explorer
  2. NVDA + Firefox
  3. VoiceOver + Safari / Chrome

You can check out the most recent WebAim survey which gives a bit of insight into which browsers and adaptive technologies are most used: https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/

I think you're definitely limiting yourself by only testing with VoiceOver, and not getting an accurate reflection of what the community as a whole is likely to be using.

As far as WCAG 2.0 (AA) goes, make sure you're also checking colour contrast combinations for text & backgrounds - a good free tool you can use is Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA): https://developer.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastanalyser/

I like to use this WCAG 2.0 cheat sheet, which gives a high level overview of each criteria. If I'm unsure about whether something falls under one of the criteria listed I'll go view the full "how to meet" and "understanding" pages on W3C. https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

Don't rely too heavily on automated tools. While they can definitely assist, they really don't pick up as much as a human does. Unfortunately I've got no tools to recommend to you as we do all our accessibility conformance reviews manually :)

Best of luck!

Upvotes: 0

Adam
Adam

Reputation: 18875

Testing accessibility with a screenreader is just a small part of testing accessibility. There's no requisit about using one screenreader for testing as your website is required with any assistive technologies (which includes many screenreaders, screen magnifier, braille display, eye tracking devices, voice activated navigation, keyboard-only/mouse-only/touch-only navigation, ...) by conforming to the guidelines.

Automatic tools can partially speed up the process. You can use the WCAG list to test a few of them, but Stackoverflow is not the place to ask for this question : Where can I ask about "finding a tool, library or favorite off-site resource?"

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions