Accessibility Testing with Azure DevOps Pipelines
In this post I am going to walk you through an example of how to improve the accessibility of your web applications using Azure DevOps Pipelines.
I was recently working with one of my customers to help them improve the usability of their applications as mandated by their IT staff. The goal was to create quality web applications that can be equally useful to all users including those with disabilities. Together, we reviewed many good tools and potential best practices, but we wanted something that would specifically run as part of the application release process.
While there are other tools available to test the accessibility of your web site within a web browser or IDE, doing so as part of your CI/CD routines makes the most sense. Having continuous insight into your accessibility compliance makes it easier to manage and address potential issues as they are found. Adding these quality and approval gates also keeps non-compliant applications from reaching production without explicit management intervention.
Just like automated unit tests or automated integration tests, usability and accessibility testing should be continuous and automated.
To learn more, have a look at the Accessibility Testing Extension I developed.
How it works
Once configured, as you release your code to a QA or lower environment the accessibility task will run to test what has just been released. You will give the task a few URLs to test, and using well known accessibility rules, the task will find any accessibility violations. Violations found can then be used as a basis for submitting a bug as part of your normal QA process or a clean accessibility report can be shared with the team showing your compliance.
So what is a task? A task in Azure DevOps is a bit of code that will run as part of a pipeline that executes during your build or release. There are many built in tasks to do almost anything or you can create custom tasks to suit your team’s specific needs.
To learn more about creating your own custom Azure Pipeline tasks, have a look at the following resource.
