With better understanding about what accessibility really is we can also find some surprising theoretical revelations.
It is possible that our website is 100% WCAG compliant and still not accessible.
can really surprise us…
But it is actually very logical – WCAG are only guidelines that should be applied to content and do not define the usability. Accessibility has a lot to do with usability as well. We can make our site WCAG compliant and still have a bad screen-reader usability for example. So screen-reader users can experience difficulties when using the site or site’s elements also if we made sure everything is compliant with WCAG.
Therefore it is crucial to also test with assistive technologies, especially screen-readers, on desktop and on mobile, with different combinations of screen-readers and browsers, to really verify the accessibility.
WCAG will for sure help, but it alone will not always be enough
WCAG success criteria is technology-agnostic, so it can be applied to any digital surface, but at the same time this is also limiting it’s effects on specific technologies.
At the same time we must not forget the differences of support from one assistive technology to another. This has nothing to do with WCAG but a lot to do with usability.
For example some ARIA tags are not (yet) supported on some screen-reader and browser combinations, therefore we could be passing the WCAG but also failing to really be accessible.
Manual testing is therefore even more important
While automatic testing will help to some degree (it is estimated that it can be approximately 20%, some improvements are being done so this can also be a bit higher) and can add to quality in the development and release life-cycles – we ought to test manually as well, based on user journeys and maybe even personas.
Then we can really improve our accessibility and be confident of it.
