How to make website accessible with Web Accessibility Testing?
Tags: testing, qa, tutorial
Published: 2020-06-04 14:35:11

Web Accessibility is one of the most important challenges for software in the present world. An accessible web application can help enterprises to achieve many benefits such as more number of visitors, helps to maintain user-satisfaction, enables the web content accessible for all users with disabilities, etc. However, leverage accessibility testing, it is essential to consider certain best ways such that it helps in making the web application accessible. 

Every enterpriser aims for having a web application that is successful and attracts as many as visitors. But, to make this ensured, there are a number of measures to be taken up for making a website accessible. Maintaining an accessible website is not challenging when teams can understand every issue or the bug that can be an obstacle while performing accessibility testing. 

By having an overview of the issues or the bugs, it becomes easier for the teams to find ways that can help in achieving accessible web applications. Accessibility testing has huge importance for a user-friendly web application, hence, teams understand their users and follow the best ways to make a web application accessible.

What is Accessibility Testing?

Accessibility Testing is one of the types of software testing. By performing this type of testing, teams can ensure that the web application is accessible for people with disabilities such as deafness, blindness, color blindness, etc.

There are a number of <a href="https://www.testingxperts.com/blog/Why-Accessibility-Testing-is-Important">accessibility testing</a> tools such as WAVE, aDesigner, JAWS, AChecker, Web Acc Checker, etc., used by the testing teams for performing web accessibility testing.

5 Ways to Make a Web Application Accessible

1. Avoid direct navigation and media: Enabling direct playing of media files can cause dissatisfaction among and it can even annoy them in certain instances with huge loading time. Also, by playing media directly can cause difficulty to close when using a screen reader. Hence, the best practice is to avoid automatic navigation as this can create frustration and dissatisfaction among the users.

2. Make use of ARIA Tag: ARIA or the Accessible Rich Internet Applications is a set of HTML attribute that can help in making web content and web application accessible for disabilities. By using these special accessibility HTML attributes, it becomes easier to add them for any markup. Also, the ARIA attributes help in identifying the active and inactive state of objects.

3. Ensure Keyboard Navigation: Anything that is on the website is essential to be accessed with the keyboard. Thus, there shouldn’t be any type of mess created with navigation buttons.
 
4. Make use of better tables: It is a good practice to add captions with the help of caption tags for tables. This will help in easy understanding with the help of screen readers. Also, by adding the “scope” element, screen readers can rattle off a series of table cells.
 
5. Ensure Colour is not the only mode to convey: Depending completely on color for identifying the required fields is not a good method of accessibility testing. This way of using colors without considering any alternative methods to convey information can raise issues for people with color blindness and the ones using a screen reader. Hence, ensure to use alternative methods along with color to convey information.
 
Conclusion:

Web Accessibility Testing is one of the important practices to ensure that a developed application is quality-ensured and is easily accessible for all users with disabilities. Accessibility testing ensures to provide a good number of benefits for users and enterprises. 

But, to achieve these successful goals, before planning for the accessibility testing, the teams are required to find the best ways that can enhance the testing practice. Leverage accessibility testing services from next-gen testing services provider to make your web application accessible by using the latest and best accessibility testing practices.