Accessibility Fail Fast Testing Prep

Good planning will prevent the need to run multiple complete manual accessibility test cycles.

4 black and white cartoon drawings of people falling — off a ladder, slipping on a floor, off a flight of stairs, and off a curb

It was Thomas Edison who famously said:

I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work

While Thomas Edison never had to deal with the internet (or accessibility !), his principle of “learning from failure” is one commonly used in software projects today.

Fail fast is a type of QA methodology commonly seen in Agile projects. The idea is to find catastrophic failures early, by:

• trying to test as early as possible rather than waiting until the end when the “formal” testing cycle traditionally occurs
• testing known weak points and finding failures quickly in the QA cycle to send it back for rework BEFORE you have too much work invested that will have to be re-done if you find a catastrophic failure late in the game

Because only approximately 30 % of HTML accessibility testing can be automated and the other 70 % is manual, there is a lot to be said about using an accessibility flavor of the fail fast methodology. No one wants to run three comprehensive manual accessibility test cycles because you failed on something import…