As we can see, integrating the Internet into our daily life. Without the Internet, you can not imagine how you would do many complex tasks with ease and quickly with the use of the Internet and software applications. However, ensuring accessibility can be challenging and time-consuming for web developers and testers. That’s where automated accessibility testing comes in.
Automated accessibility testing is testing your web app or website to make it easily accessible for all categories of users, such as normal, specially-abled, or disabled people. Accessibility testing aims to remove the limitation of the user base even if they are not normal in terms of physical ability. Not only can accessibility testing enhance your app, but it can bring many benefits, such as improved user experience, increased market reach, improved SEO, and enhanced brand reputation.
Many tools and frameworks can be used to perform accessibility testing, but Selenium is one of the most preferred. Selenium is the first choice for QA teams when discussing any kind of website testing. In this article, you will see what accessibility testing is and its benefits. Then, you will see the best practices that should be followed to get the best accessibility testing output.
What is Accessibility Testing?
Accessibility testing is software application or website testing to check the accessibility to people with disability. Accessibility testing ensures that all the UI elements and content of the website are accessible to the users. Accessibility testing is another type of software testing used to test the application from the physically challenged person’s point of view. Here, the physical disability could be old age, hearing, color blindness, and other underprivileged groups. Accessibility testing is also known as 508 compliance testing.
You can also opt for cloud-based accessibility testing to make your testing more convenient and more fruitful. Accessibility Cloud offers automatic and manual accessibility tests, monitoring, and compliance management within the same powerful platform. Test & monitor your websites and documents against WCAG, EN 301 549, Section 508, and ADA. Performing cloud-based accessibility tests have several benefits. It reduces resource usage. You can efficiently use the resources and need to pay for the used resource only. It increases the testing scope and reliability.
Now, let us look over various pointers that reflect why we need to perform accessibility testing for our website.
Need for Accessibility Testing
- It is recommended that the website and web app you develop should come out with laws and legalizations that mandate that IT products be accessible to persons with disabilities. All the government organizations focused on this point very specifically because of a huge number of users across the globe who are specially-abled.
- Also, the W3C (World Wide Consortium) created some rules and guidelines for website development and testing for accessibility testing. These include the website being perceivable, operable, and understandable by normal, disabled, and specially-abled users.
- When you make your website accessible for normal as well as for disabled people, it is obvious that your user base will grow exponentially. With such testing, you can develop a website or web app that will remove barriers to access for people with disabilities, increasing their customer base and improving their reputation.
- Accessibility testing also helps create websites and applications with minimal and functioning user interfaces, such as simpler navigation. These little improvements reduce bounce rates and encourage more frequent use of them.
Best Practices for Selenium Accessibility Testing
Now, let’s see the top and best practices recommended by the tech experts to make your Selenium accessibility testing efficient and provide the best possible software application.
- Use both Manual and Automated Testing
When you are performing accessibility testing with Selenium, it is recommended to use both manual and automated approaches for performing the editing process. Because both these tests have their advantages and capabilities. Manual Testing shows lower accuracy due to the higher possibility of human errors. Automation testing depicts a higher accuracy due to computer-based testing, eliminating the chances of errors. Doing so increases the testing efficiency and quickly finds any possible errors and bugs. Automated testing can quickly identify common issues, while manual testing can reveal more complex problems.
- Test Across Devices and Browsers
Testing across various types of devices and browsers is a very important practice when performing accessibility testing using Selenium. To meet this, cross-browser testing refers to verifying that web applications work as expected across many combinations of web browsers, operating systems, and their versions and devices. Many cloud-based software testing tools like LambdaTest provide different emulators and virtual machines that help developers test their websites like real web browsers.
LambdaTest is a comprehensive platform that uses artificial intelligence to make the process of running manual and automated tests on a large scale smooth and efficient. It offers a versatile testing environment where users can perform real-time and automated testing across various configurations, including browsers and real mobile devices.
One of the standout aspects of LambdaTest is its ability to handle testing operations at scale. Whether real-time manual testing or automation testing across various environments, LambdaTest provides the necessary infrastructure and resources to meet testing requirements on a large scale.
LambdaTest supports automated testing, enabling users to create scripts for executing test scenarios. This helps achieve faster and more reliable test execution, especially for repetitive tasks like regression testing.
These virtual machines provide an environment like a different system on your existing system. This is one of the best practices while performing accessibility testing with Selenium.
- Regularly Maintain and Update your Website
Updating and maintaining your website is crucial for a successful and high-end testing result. Since there are many ups and downs in the whole testing process. You need to maintain and update your website and the test suite. It helps to keep all the stakeholders involved in the accessibility testing process updated. If not maintained and updated in some certain period, it may cause testing delays and less awareness about the current status of the testing process. And hence, the testing efficiency will degrade. So, maintaining and updating the website and test slots is a very good practice that should be followed by the testing and QA team for accessibility testing with Selenium.
- Selecting Right Tools
Automated accessibility testing is the process of making your website more and more accessible to normal and specially-abled persons too. However, choosing specific tools to integrate with Selenium for better accessibility testing is challenging. Various factors should be considered while choosing the best tools for accessibility testing. You can consider factors like business requirements, the specifications of testing you will perform, testing resource capacity, and many other factors.
Using the appropriate tools for writing tests also helps to speed up the test automation process. These software management tools offer various features, such as a customizable dashboard, various types of widgets, real-time metrics, interactive reports, graphical representation, etc.
- Use Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
When you are performing accessibility testing, you must check the guidelines and policies for your website accessibility. You need to follow the WCAG guidelines to make your website as follows. It will degrade the possibility of any unwanted trouble related to website accessibility for any kind of user. WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG is based on four main guiding principles of accessibility known by the acronym POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
These guidelines consist of many guidelines that must be followed by the development and testing team in accessibility testing. So, it is one of the best practices to follow these guidelines to make a great website for general people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, etc.
- Document and Track Issues
Documenting all the issues you get during the accessibility testing and keeping track of them is a good practice suggested by the testing experts. You can use the “Digital Accessibility Services” (DAS). It has created a template for assessing the accessibility of websites and presenting issues in a meaningful way to colleagues, leadership, vendors, or anyone else interested in remediating accessibility issues and monitoring progress. Doing this allows the developers and QA team to record all the issues they get while doing the accessibility testing. If they rectify the issues, it should also be maintained and documented in the record. So, always document and track your testing issues when performing accessibility testing with Selenium.
- Check Compatibility with Assistive Technology
Assistive technology is an assistive software or mini device used to help physically disabled people. This tool helps them to surf the website and make easy interactions on the website. It ensures that there should be no issues while accessing the various visual components of the website by physically disabled people. Many assistive tools and technologies include screen readers, speech recognition, magnifiers, etc.
For example, you can use the W3C Markup Validation Service to check your HTML code for errors. One more thing to consider in this accessibility testing practice is to test with assistive technologies to perform website testing with real users. It will help you get real-time and genuine feedback from real users, and you can bring changes to the website to increase its accessibility.
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of the software organization is to make your website or software application widely available for maximum users to ensure their website and app content is accessible to all individuals, including those with impairments. To meet this requirement, you can do accessibility testing. Accessibility testing is the process of using software to test for accessibility issues in websites and web applications. This process ensures your app’s content and services are usable by people with disabilities of various types, such as vision, hearing, etc.
But performing accessibility testing with less complexity and more productivity, you need to follow some rules and best practices. In this article, you have seen the best practices, such as following WCAG guidelines, using the right automation tool for real devices and real users, etc.
