I get it – the common wish is to make all kinds of tests automatic – unit tests, end to end tests, regression tests and even user interface tests are very often boring and deserve automation.
So there is for sure also a tendency to automate accessibility testing as much as it can possibly be done.
It would be perfect if we could automate every step of it.
From screen readers, when zooming in, to check if alternative texts give correct meaning in their context and so on. But unfortunately it is not possible to automate every success criterion in the WCAG. And because of that we can not cover whole conformance with automatic tests alone. Some good tools can come to about 25% and some proprietary test tools even get to about 40% but what do we do with the rest?
Well we need to test manually. And that means that Quality Assurance must get their hands on screen-readers and other assistive technologies on multiple platforms, besides understanding acceptance criteria for WCAG and really get the whole accessibility aspect.There is no other way. No shortcuts here.
Maybe some future artificial intelligence and some robotic approaches will raise the current bar, but in the next couple of years accessibility must remain to be tested by humans. And do not believe if somebody want’s to tell (sell) you some magical tool that can fix or test accessibility “automagically”.
QA needs to get familiar with the whole spectrum of accessibility, especially the acceptance criteria – how to know when a page or a component or even an element really is accessible and all WCAG success criteria is covered.
This means basically that QA engineers must get their hands on the developer and designer knowledge so that they can effectively test and confirm the overall accessibility.
My suggestion is as follows:
- learn more about different disabilities and how people with them use the web or mobile app,
- get known with WCAG into details, especially the acceptance criteria per success criteria,
- get familiar with WAI ARIA practices, as they demonstrate quite well how should most common active components work and behave,
- start using screen readers, on desktop and on mobile devices, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android,
- make most out of automatic tools but do not rely solely on them.
Now, as we can probably understand, QA and developer roles are very interrelated and they should actually work more close together to reach a common goal – an accessible product.