Accessibility is a Human Right.

Access to the web or mobile application is a human right. So as a tester it’s our responsibility to make sure our application is possible enough to use by every human being around the world. In accessibility testing, we are focusing the people who are with disabilities. Like,

- Vision Disabilities — The people who are completely blind or color blindness and poor vision or some visual problems

- Hearing Disabilities — Auditory problems like deafness and hearing impairments

- Physical Disabilities — Where the people can’t use or hard to use equipment like a keyboard, mouse, and other devices.

- Cognitive conditions — Who has a poor memory or difficulty understanding or learning things.

- Literacy Disability — Where the people hard to find words or have reading problems.

Let’s talk about the importance and why do we need accessibility testing?

Provide to market for disabled people — If our software can use by any person including disabled ones, that can be a good marketing strategy for the company and it will be more user-friendly and effective for all users.

Accessibility Laws and legalizations — There are some laws that have been made all over the government agencies for accessibility people and those legalizations are agreed to provide them access to the software for every disabled people.

- “Americans with disabilities act”: This law states that all the domains like public buildings, schools, and organizations should make the technology accessible to everyone.

- “Rehabilitation Act, section 504 and section 508”: Section 504 accommodates all people with disabilities to access workplace, education & other organization and section 508 accommodates access to technology.

- “Web content accessibility guidelines”: These guidelines suggest ways that can help to improve the accessibility of a website.

We can do accessibility testing both manually and by automating the application. If I talk about the accessibility of the web, it is measured according to the web accessibility standards created by the W3C known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the guidelines from other departments which follow Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

The things we need to consider in the manual testing are;

- High text contrast — Increase the ratio between text or images and background color. Setting high contrast we can highlight the content of the website.

- Not accessing the Images — Because of the loading issues, there may be a late or take a long time to load the images. So the best way to off the access to images temporarily.

- Usage of the keyboard — Try to use the keyboard as much as possible and be familiar with shortcut keys.

- Cascading style sheet (CSS) — By turning off the CSS we can check for the background color, text style, and text presentation style are working fine.

- Dynamic font size — Option for users to increase the font size to fit their needs.

- Field label — By using this, one can fill out the necessary information while signing up or ordering something online.

- Content scaling — Try to zoom out the image and check if it is readable.

- Skip navigation — This may be useful for people with motor disabilities. By clicking “Ctrl + Home” the user can move the focus to the top of the page.

- PDF document — Try to save the PDF file in the form of text and check if the order for the content is maintained or not.

Manual Accessibility testing is a bit of a challenge with the requirements and situations. As a solution, automation testing for accessibility has been introduced. Let’s have a look at automation tools and testing for accessibility.

- WebAnywhere — It’s the simplest tool without special installations and it’s like a screen recorder.

- Firefox Accessibility Extension — It is an extension in Firefox

- Vischeck — It reproduces the image with different forms and checks how the users can access those.

- aDesigner — It is developed by IBM and used for visually impaired people.

- Color Contrast Analyzer — Checks for color combinations and analyzes their visibility of them.

- PDF Accessibility Checker — It checks for the accessibility of a PDF file.

- Hera — It checks for the style of the application and comes with multilingual options.

- TAW online — It gives you the option to test check if the software is developed as per the guideline of WCAG 1.0 or WCAG 2.0. It also has the option of selecting the level of analysis.

And there are some software to test the accessibility;

- Speech Recognition Software — It will convert the spoken word to text, which serves as input to the computer.

- Screen reader software — Used to read out the text that is displayed on the screen

- Screen Magnification Software — Used to enlarge the monitor and make reading easy for vision-impaired users.

As a best practice, all developers and testers should be implemented and test the accessibility of the application in the initial stage of the project and testing accessibility is a must. By doing it we can make our system disabled-friendly to every user around the world.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.