Design Template by Anonymous

Testing and Resources

Testing strategies

There are a few different strategies for testing out the features you have implemented in your website. Below are the different methods for testing your site:

User Testing

This is by far the best way to test your website for accessibility. User testing involves getting actual, regular users of the internet to test your website. In this case, you'll want to find users who have the specific disabilities you are testing for, so that you can get actually helpful results. For example if you want to test out the screen readability of the website, ask a person who is blind to check out the site, and ask them how the experience was and what they got hung up on. If there are issues with the navigability or understanding of the content, you'll be able to best find out this was. While user testing is a great solution, it is certainly not always practical to test for every single type of user. In the cases where you cannot find enough users to test out everything on your site, you do have other options.

Manual Testing

Manually testing the features you want to use is entirely possible, but will require a lot of work and research on your part in order to make sure you are covering all your bases. What you do in this case, is artificially "create" the disability you are trying to test for. If you want to test the website for blind users, install a screen reader tool, learn how to use it, then put on a blindfold and try to navigate the websute. This type of testing certainly is not as conclusive as a user test, but it is helpful for some on the fly testing and in testing the site if you are a small independent developer without a whole lot of resources or connections.

Automatic scanning tools

A handfull of testing tools are available online that claim to allow you to test your website for accessibility and give you a score based on how well you have done. They also will call out any errors or bugs in your accessibility portion of the website. While these tools are certainly quick and easy to use, they almost never catch anywhere close to the amount of things you need to take into consideration when developing an accessible website. It is always a good idea to run your website through a scanner just to see how it does, but this should not be the only strategy you use for testing. One solid option is the WebAim.org WAVE tool. It is available at the link below and you can simply type the URL of the website into the box and it will give you advice on how well the site is doing for accessibility.

Resources

The best places to find information, such as code examples, guidelines and more are below:

Great resource for exploring the unique needs of users with disabilities

W3 Consortium information on WCAG guidelines

Information on HTML5 semantic elements, as mentioned before. W3Schools is also a great place to find information on keyboard interaction and navigational interfaces.