Accessibility Testing

Accessibility testing is the way to make your websites, application and projects accessible for everyone, you may have clients or users with visual disabilities, no mouse and with no way to access your website and its components.

It's important to keep in mind that accessibility contains 3 levels according to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) level A, AA and AAA, if you support AA you must support A and AA and if you support AAA you must support AA and A, each level is different and contains more criteria to met. In terms of accessibility guidelines, A is the basic level, AA is the most used and a good level of accessibility, finally, AAA is the level with most complexity. In my experience AAA level is only used for medical systems or pharmaceutical companies. For more information about these levels and their criteria, you can visit https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20

There are a lot of test cases and criteria on the page mentioned above, however I'm not going to repeat information in here and there's a lot of websites about accessibility. In my experience there is a basic checklist for you to test your websites speaking about accessibility, here it is:

• Test that you can navigate the site using only the keyboard.
• For AA, check the contrast of background and foreground (there are a lot of tools for this).
• All images must have alt text.
• There must not be empty buttons.
• There's a great tool that checks your website and displays all the errors, it's called WAVE, you can either go to http://wave.webaim.org and test your websites or download the WAVE plugin for Chrome browser.
• Pass a screen reader on your website, you can use Jaws (only for Windows) or a plugin for Chrome called Chromevox. You don't need the tool only to talk about where you are at, what you need is for the screen reader to tell the user valid and useful information, for instance if you are on a link, the screen reader must not say just "Link" it must say the link name or where it should take the user, it must be significant for the user.
• Download a plugin to see the website without CSS or styles and make sure what you see makes sense and that the site can be understood.

You must think not only in most users that will use your system, but also on the less common users that won't have all access to the site, think about this, when you go to the mall you use the regular stairs to enter but as you can see there are some ramps for people with wheelchairs to use, that is the best example of accessibility, not only think about users that have all accessories and capabilities, but also to those who don't. It's important for you as a QA to propose accessibility on projects you work on.

Use the tools, dive into accessibility, you will discover it not only helps the people but also challenges developers to start doing accessible applications, websites or systems, spread the word and start making all websites accessible.

@LuchoAgileQA