In today’s digital age of the internet, websites and applications serve as an integral part of people’s daily lives. People depend on online websites for almost every aspect of their ordinary routines, whether it’s shopping, banking, traveling, working, communication, or entertainment, as well as leveraging online services for financial, health, and legal advice, or staying connected with friends and family near and far most of their activities are now revolve around digital interfaces.
With this, it becomes crucial to provide digital experiences with accessible content to all users, without facing barriers including those with disabilities. This is where the role of accessibility testing comes in. Testing for website accessibility is a critical aspect for its online success as it helps in removing barriers and making the user’s virtual world more inclusive.
Among various browsers that users use to access the website, Chrome has emerged as the most popular web browser globally. This makes accessibility testing Chrome an essential aspect to ensure that the site remains accessible to Chrome users because the majority of global users favor Chrome as their primary or only browser. The reason behind Chrome’s popularity is that it provides a set of built-in accessibility features which is designed to make the browsing experience smoother every time users access a website including the disabled one.
In this article, we will discuss accessibility testing in Chrome, including tools and techniques for inclusive design, while discussing why it is important to test website accessibility, and what to test in accessibility testing. But before that let’s first have a brief introduction to what accessibility testing is. So let’s get started.
Accessibility testing
User Experience designers design and develop websites in such a way that their creations cater to a diverse audience regardless of disability. Accessibility testing helps in thoroughly evaluating how easily users with disabilities can navigate, interact, and use a website. This helps in providing valuable information for improving future designs for users with and without disabilities.
Performing accessibility testing testers and developers can ensure that the web and mobile applications can be easily used by everyone including people with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities. Additionally, they can achieve this by thoroughly evaluating the application against established accessibility standards and laws such as WCAG Compliance. The objective of this is to solve accessibility issues and create an inclusive digital environment for every user.
In short, accessibility testing ensures a balance between functions and features that are put in place to address the needs of people with different disabilities and increase website accessibility are working as intended.
What accessibility testing test for
Website testing for accessibility evaluates various aspects including elements of the site that are usable for everyone and functionality of accessible design elements. The easier the website is to use, the more it captures the attention of the users.
A few primary examples that accessibility testing include are-
- Color contrast- Test the color contrast of text against its background like minimum contrast ratio for normal text and large text.
- Text Alternatives- Alt or alternative text is for users who cannot see the images. These images are verified by testers for appropriate alt attributes or aria-labels.
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Testing- This is performed to ensure that roles and attributes of ARIA are correctly applied to elements. This is to enhance the screen reader experience.
- Keyboard Accessibility- This is tested to verify keyboard shortcuts like the “Tab” key so that a website or app can be navigated using only the keyboard.
Components of accessibility testing
Millions of people with disabilities impact their major life activities. Therefore to effectively test web accessibility it is important to consider diverse disabilities requiring additional assistance. These disabilities are-
Mobility- It is the difficulty in walking, climbing stairs, and accessing physical infrastructure. Therefore it is important to test the website accessibility for those with mobility challenges.
Cognition- It is the difficulty in concentrating, remembering, or making decisions. Therefore it is important while checking for accessibility to ensure that the forms and menus on the website are not complex for those with cognitive difficulties.
Hearing- It is the difficulty in hearing conversations or digital media. Therefore while testing for accessibility testers must ensure that their site has multiple videos or audio media options for those suffering from hearing impairment.
Vision- It is the difficulty in reading text or watching videos. Testing the accessibility of a website it is important to check that the site supports audio descriptions and includes context-first text.
Independent living- It is the difficulty in performing basic daily tasks such as running errands or cooking food. This is why ease of use of a website for these visitors is paramount so that they can easily find what they’re looking for.
Self-care- It is the difficulty with day-to-day behaviors such as self-care like dressing or bathing due to physical or cognitive disabilities. An easily-scalable text and image element on a website can save these users needless frustration.
Why Chrome accessibility is vital
Since Chrome is the most popular and widely used web browser. With such an extensive user base it is important to fulfill the accessibility needs of Chrome users, provide satisfaction, and better reputation. In short, prioritizing the importance of an accessible web application on Chrome ensures that testers do not miss out on a wider range of potential users.
Also making the website accessible to Chrome users will help in improving the search engine ranking. According to Google when ranking websites in search results it needs accessibility into account. Improving the website’s accessibility boosts the chances of being easily found by people. Making the website accessible helps to attract more users including users with disabilities, as well as avoiding legal liability.
e searching for the information that the site offers.
Techniques for accessibility testing
Teams can approach accessibility testing using different techniques and methods like manual, automated, or hybrid testing. Each approach has its advantages, limitations, use cases, and overall project needs. Ideally, a combination of both manual and automated testing approaches is usually the best way to a well-rounded approach and ensure that accessibility issues are identified and addressed.
Automated accessibility testing
Automated testing approach to accessibility testing involves using testing tools to check a website or application for accessibility issues, such as missing alternative text, or inaccessible form controls.
Automated accessibility testing tools quickly help to assess the accessibility level of a website or application, and provide different reasons why persons with disabilities might encounter problems on the site. It also allows testers to monitor real-time testing metrics and inspect the whole website without navigating each page separately.
Manual accessibility testing
The manual testing approach to accessibility testing involves testing the application by human testers using different assistive technologies, like screen readers and keyboard-only navigation.
Manual accessibility testing becomes essential because the automated accessibility testing approach has its limitations. It can effectively detect issues, for example, it can identify if alt text is present or not, but it can’t tell if alt text has a relevant meaning for accessibility. Manual testing requires human expertise that helps to check automated tests and navigate the website just like a disabled person would.
User testing
Manual testing techniques are time-consuming and require a big effort because organizations would need to hire a lot of testers to perform periodic assessments. Also, in manual testing, though human testers pretend to have disabilities, there are chances of missing some important checks.
Hence, full scope can only be achieved with real people who access the web using assistive technologies. For this organizations prefer user testing, where the application is tested by real users instead of manual testers. This testing technique involves recruiting people with impairments to test the application and providing feedback on their experience.
Tools for accessibility testing in Chrome
Web accessibility testing tools help in evaluating and improving the accessibility of websites and web applications. There are various accessibility tools available that can help designers and testers ensure their websites are accessible to a diverse range of users on Chrome. Some of them are discussed below.
LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools
LambdaTest is an AI-powered orchestration and execution platform that allows performing web accessibility testing both manual and automated tests at scale. It’s an all-in-one platform that provides built-in Accessibility DevTools for macOS and iOS for accessibility testing and monitoring. Testers can use this platform to run both real-time and automation testing across more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browsers online.
LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools is a powerful tool used to test website accessibility. It allows testing of individual pages and end-to-end user flows. It seamlessly integrates into the workflow providing all needed tools and functionalities to detect, fix, and ensure the website is as per accessibility standards. For each issue found, LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools provides the stored code and UX along with recommendations for fixing the problem.
Key feature-
- Accessibility testing of web applications to check potential accessibility issues and resolve them.
- Compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to ensure that the websites meet the standards to cater to users with disabilities.
- Automated accessibility testing for streamlining the testing process and catching issues early in the application development cycle.
- Seamlessly integrate into the existing development and testing workflows for added convenience.
- Allows testing the website’s accessibility across different browsers to ensure a consistent user experience.
- Inspect individual elements on the website to highlight accessibility issues and make targeted fixes.
- Stay updated with the latest accessibility standards and best practices for creating more inclusive web experiences.
- Provide detailed reporting pinpointing accessibility issues and suggestions for fixes for an improved website’s accessibility score.
- LambdaTest integrates with Selenium ChromeDriver to enable automated cross-browser testing in the cloud.
Ax DevTools
Axe DevTools is an easy-to-use in-browser accessibility tool for Chrome and Firefox. It empowers UX designers to perform accessibility testing directly within their browser’s developer tools. This streamlined approach allows testers to quickly find and correct accessibility issues with a detailed report.
Key Features-
- Comprehensive reporting that highlights accessibility violations and offers actionable recommendations and feedback.
- Enables in-browser accessibility testing by integrating into the browser’s developer tools. Thus enabling real-time accessibility evaluations while designing and developing web content.
- Axe DevTools can be integrated with developer workflows, allowing UX designers to seamlessly incorporate accessibility testing into their existing development and designing processes, enhancing productivity.
- Provide various resources, enabling designers to understand and address accessibility issues effectively.
WAVE(Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools)
WAVE is a Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool that allows UX designers to identify and fix accessibility issues on a web page. This is a free online accessibility evaluation tool for basic testing. It helps identify the potential usability issues related to web websites, such as missing alternative text for images, poor contrast, improper headings, and inaccessible links.
Key Features-
- WAVE offers real-time accessibility evaluation, allowing designers to see accessibility issues as they design and develop web pages.
- Detailed reporting to highlight errors and suggest improvements, making it easier to understand and rectify issues.
- WAVE provides color contrast analysis, a critical aspect of accessibility. With this analysis, users can check for color contrast to ensure text is legible for all users.
- For a streamlined accessibility testing process, it provides integration support with popular development tools and content management systems.
Google Lighthouse
Google has made accessibility easy with its Chrome DevTools. Lighthouse is an open-source automated web accessibility tool in Google Chrome that can run programmatically with JavaScript for creating custom web accessibility tests for more complex sites. It requires no setup or extensions as it is already available in Chrome Developer Tools. It can be used as a Node module, thus enabling testers to incorporate Lighthouse into their continuous integration systems.
Lighthouse performs several audits covering all WCAG requirements, including missing alt text, inconsistent header structures, and low color contrasting ratios. After performing each audit, it scores the web page’s accessibility and provides suggestions for improvements.
Color Contrast Analyser (CCA)
The Color Contrast Analyser is an accessibility testing tool that helps to determine the legibility of text and the contrast of visual elements, like graphical controls and visual indicators.
Conclusion
Accessibility testing plays a key role in ensuring that the website has an all-inclusive design and is accessible by all visitors irrespective of their disabilities.
Using a combination of tools and techniques mentioned above, testers can accommodate all visitors with specific solutions, improved universal controls, and ease of use, and ensure that they don’t overlook any errors or gaps. This helps in delivering web content that is easily accessible, expanding the potential audience reach, and providing the best user experience to all visitors.
