Must-Have Accessibility Testing Tools for Testing the Accessibility of Your Digital Product

In the modern era, web technologies are able to change lives by providing unprecedented access to products, information, and services. The practice of Web Accessibility helps people with disabilities to be a part of this change. To make it a reality we need to work on eliminating the accessibility barriers and accessibility testing can help in removing these barriers. In this article, we will be exploring the benefits of accessibility testing and some tools that can help us in executing our accessibility tests.

So let’s start

What is accessibility testing?

Digital accessibility ensures that everyone, irrespective of age or disability can easily use digital products. It aims at providing all people the facility to navigate, understand, and interact with electronic information. The testing mechanism to test

these digital technologies to ensure that each and every user can easily access the products is known as Accessibility Testing.

Following are some of the disabilities that affect clear access to the Web:

• auditory
• Cognitive
• physical
• speech
• visual
• Neurological

Why is accessibility testing important?

Digital accessibility is now becoming a legal requirement so that digital products are accessible to all people. Besides accessibility also assures that the product is accessible to a large section of society. Although this practice may take some effort it can certainly increase the audience reach and market share. Accessibility testing will also enhance user experience (UX) for every one of your visitors.

How do you test accessibility?

Accessibility testing is performed in different stages which include:

1. Planning to test for accessibility
2. Using manual or automated testing methods to test for accessibility
3. Analysis of test results
4. Reporting of the results

What are the Four Guiding principles of accessibility?

These four principles include — perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

1. Perceivable

For many users, Percieveable means that they can identify content and interface elements by means of their senses. The text should be readable and the web page is uncluttered.

2. Operable

Users should successfully be able to use controls, buttons, navigation, and other interactive elements. The site should be accessible using a range of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, and text-to-speech software.

3. Understandable

Text content should be simple and users should be able to comprehend the content.

4. Robust

This checks if the site content is compatible with the existing and future technologies

Following are some of the accessibility Testing tools used in the industry:

1. WAVE

WAVE tool helps in making web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can easily identify accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline errors. To Test accessibility, you can use your website via wave.webaim.org or you can install WAVE Extension from https://wave.webaim.org/extension/

2. Axe chrome plugin

Axe chrome plugin helps to find and fix common accessibility issues in your web applications. It is one of the widely used plugins and supports various formats like HTML and XHTML. This plugin is free and easily accessible.

3. AccessiBe

AccessiBe provides solutions to help businesses comply with ADA and WCAG requirements. It provides different AI-Powered solutions for testing and remediating web accessibility issues.

4. Tenon

Tenon is an automated accessibility tool that helps to solve any accessibility problem. Tenon’s website allows you to enter a URL to test or paste code directly for analysis.

5. AATT

AATT is an open-source tool that tests web applications regarding conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It automatically checks single web pages and groups of web pages or sites.

Conclusion:

Accessibility testing and adhering to the WCAG guidelines can help you build applications that are accessible to all and thus improves the overall usability of an app. It also helps in uplifting the brand image of the organization apart from meeting legal compliances. In this article, we saw the reasons to perform accessibility testing and some tools that can assist you in the process of accessibility testing.

At Testrig Technologies our QA experts have sound knowledge of accessibility testing and various regulations and standards like WCAG along with region-specific regulations including the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. We ensure that your application adheres to all these regulations and the application is easily accessible by people with disabilities.

If you’re interested in learning more about our software QA testing services, please visit Testrig Technologies. We’re a leading software testing company and we’re always happy to help.