Specialists admit that there is no such thing as “perfect accessibility” or a site being “100% accessible”. Different types of evaluations allow website owners to know how accessible their websites are and help them schedule upgrades.
It is essential to test the website/ mobile app accessibility early and regularly. Achieving web accessibility generally becomes easier and cheaper when addressed from the early stage.
Web projects typically go through multiple stages. If you can build accessibility testing into each step of the process, you can find and fix accessibility problems before they go live.
Accessibility testing methods
Accessibility testing means testing a website or an app against industry standards WCAG and evaluating how your product behaves for people who use assistive technologies (such as screen readers, screen magnification or alternatives for mouse input). The goal of accessibility testing is to capture this information, and inform product owners, designers, editors and developers on how to make improvements.
This can be done on different levels: from basic checks to a formal, comprehensive audit that follows the WCAG Evaluation Method (WCAG-EM). Some tests can also be run automatically with a crawler.
While any webmaster can perform basic checks and automated checks, experienced third party testers should do comprehensive audits.
In this section, we will describe how to do:
- Basic checks for websites
- Basic checks for mobile applications
- Automated checks
- Comprehensive audits
- Accessibility report