And the winner is… the users!
By: Niklas Holmberg
Tags: Test Automation, Accessibility, Svt, Public Service, WCAG

And the winner is… the users!

There are a number of libraries and applications that can help you to automatically detect accessibility issues. Though it’s not really clear how much of the WCAG spec can be tested in this manner. Some say twenty percent, some say fifty. Well, it doesn’t really matter because it’s clear that a large part of the spec has to be tested manually by humans.

Even though manual testing is required it’s still very valuable with automated tests since that enables us to put more of our time into manual tests.

To visualize the results of our automatic tests we put together the Accessibility Dashboard. It contains a toplist of our different products. The toplist is not aimed to be used for blaming but we think it’s fun with a little competition between the teams. And sure, teams with no violations will be put into the spotlight and celebrated. That competition aside, the real winners here are of course the users!

A little history

Twice a year SVT Interactive has a special two week long sprint called “tech sprint”. For those sprints everyone can pitch their ideas on what to work on or explore. After the pitch we self organize to start new teams and if you have a good idea you are likely to be able to gather a group of people to work on your idea. The Accessibility Dashboard was one of those good ideas and started its journey in January 2017.

A team of four developers put together the first version of the dashboard and it worked pretty well. The problems began after the sprint… who would take care of this product now? We try to find homes for a lot of the things developed during the tech sprint but this didn’t really fit in any teams portfolio. I kept it alive with some time from hack days but it didn’t get all the love it deserved.

It wasn’t until the fall of 2019 when Erik Hedin started as a full time lead in accessibility at SVT Interactive that things started to happen. Today we are a team of four developers taking care of and developing the dashboard. We have created a team that gets to spend three days every month away from our regular teams working on the dashboard.

And now, after only a few updates and one demo at SVT, the word is spreading. We have been contacted not only by teams who want to improve but also from external companies who are inspired by our public dashboard. We can also see the increasing interest for accessibility in our statistics.

And then some tech

Previous to the tech sprint some of us had been exploring the field of libraries and applications that can help you detect accessibility issues. The best one we came across was Axe by Deque. Axe is also what Google uses for Accessibility tests in Lighthouse.

The base is a javascript library called axe-core and it can be included on any web page to detect issues. On top of that they provide extensions for both Chrome and Firefox to make this process more user friendly.

We built a node application that schedules tests once every day. To help us with executing the tests we use Puppeteer from Google. With Puppeteer you can programmatically tell a browser what to do.

So in short this is what happens:

Open an url Insert the axe-core script Run the tests and save the results

So that means we have the data, now we just need to display it the best way we can. We built the dashboard with React and made it public for anyone to see.

Why don’t you take a look? https://www.svt.se/accessibility-dashboard

Going forward

Other than the public web services tested and displayed on the dashboard SVT of course has a lot of internal pages and tools that need to be accessible. Hopefully we can create another dashboard just for our internal parts.

We at SVT of course develop more than products for the web. For instance we have many native apps for iOS and Android. Not only for phones and tablets but also for Android TV and Apple TV. These products need to be as accessible and we hope to be able to make similar automatic tests for native apps.

Credit and love…

…to everyone that has worked on the dashboard!

Lars Samuelsson

Mikael Wallin

Lisa Sterner

Julia Lindberg

Niklas Holmberg

Erik Häyry

Adam Boman

Erik Hedin

And also love and credit to the teams taking action on their products issues. Here is SVT Barn celebrating zero issues on the dashboard.