Web accessibility testing

Stages of evaluation

Preliminary review

A preliminary review involves selecting a sampling of pages from a website and applying some manual checking techniques using both mainstream graphical browsers and some specialised browsers along with one or more semi-automated accessibility evaluation tools to build a basic accessibility profile.

This will identify any obvious barriers to accessibility, but it's equally important to note what works well on the site. Any review should note the positives as well as the negatives.

A preliminary review can be conducted without any particular accessibility expertise.

Conformance evaluation

This evaluation assesses your website against the requirements of a formal standard, WCAG 2.0 being the most complete set of such benchmarks available. Like the preliminary review, this process involves testing a sampling of webpages using manual techniques and automated tools, but is more technically comprehensive, detailed and demanding.

This will identify whether your website conforms to Level A, AA and/or AAA requirements. By following WCAG 2.0, you will identify specific instances of inaccessibility and find ways to address them, giving you the basis for an implementation.

A conformance evaluation should be conducted by someone with expertise and experience in web technologies in general and web accessibility in particular.

Evaluation for specific contexts

WAI has identified four circumstances where accessibility evaluation should take into account specific circumstances as they will affect the overall evaluation and the techniques used.

Sites in development

Evaluating a website for accessibility while it is still in development is extremely beneficial, allowing you to identify accessibility issues and address them before the website becomes publicly available. It can be tricky to manage, whether your designers, developers and content people are in-house or contracted externally, and may bring up some anomalies that may not be present in the finished website.

Legacy sites

These are websites that are no longer actively maintained. While it's not surprising that older sites may have substantial accessibility issues, they may still be accessed regularly by loyal users. This is particularly true of sites that tend to have static information that doesn't need to be updated and is still useful. Many larger websites and we networks may have legacy pages tucked away.

Dynamic sites

Websites created and managed by online content management systems that extract content dynamically from databases and pour it into page templates of one sort or another require a bit of extra attention. Make sure that all stages and elements of the dynamic process are checked for accessibility, including the page templates and the database content.

Ongoing evaluation

In most circumstances, you will want to establish some way of monitoring accessibility over time, performing regular checks and inviting — and responding to — user feedback. In some cases, you may want to set up an ongoing monitoring system to evaluate accessibility on a constant basis. This may be because of the nature of the content (important information that changes often), the intended user group (people known to have accessibility needs) or the way content is added to the website (content contributed by users may affect site accessibility).

User evaluation

Having your website assessed for accessibility by real world users who have disabilities is a vital part of the evaluation process. Ideally, this level of assessment should happen after the preliminary review provides a basic outline of barriers to accessibility and the conformance evaluation delivers a more technical analysis of compliance with the requirements of WCAG 2.0.

Addressing the issues raised in the preliminary review and the conformance evaluation will allow your evaluating users with disabilities to focus on accessibility issues that don't become apparent until a real person encounters them through actual use.

There is a balance that is not always easy to get right in these kinds of processes. You may very likely be limited by practical constraints in how many users with disabilities you can involve in user evaluations, where they happen, for how long and what form they even take. When you're limited to a small number, there is some risk that those few — representing only a few accessibility needs — may give you a skewed view of your site's accessibility. Even so, getting the views of even a few users with disabilities is far more valuable than not involving any user with disabilities for fear of getting an unbalanced evaluation.

The greatest benefit from having users with disabilities evaluate the accessibility of your site is that they will base their assessment on real actions they take to complete a task or reach a target point on your site, rather than compliance with a set of theoretical benchmarks.

You may find that a site feature that theoretically should be accessible turns out to be difficult for some evaluating users to get full access to. That is a perfect outcome for you, as it allows you to address accessibility issues that would not otherwise come to light before your website goes live.

You can then plan to address those issues, knowing that you're applying best practice standards-based solutions to real world accessibility problems.

A team approach

A strong way to engage with accessibility testing is to adopt a team approach, combining:

• In-house expertise: draw on what the specialists within your organisation know about how your website is intended to work and what it should achieve
• External expertise: bring in professionals who know how to assess barriers and implement accessibility solutions in websites
• Users with disabilities: there's nothing like having real users tell you what works and what doesn't

The point of accessibility testing is to take the guesswork out of making a website accessible.

Draw on the skills available to you, bring in what you need to and approach it with real commitment, and you will build not just a more accessible website, but a better website.