Marie Cruz ▮

Introduction to Accessibility Testing

Accessibility testing is something that I have been passionate about for about a year now. Having worked on a project which involves delivering a Design System to various teams, accessibility is one area that our team has focused on. I started my career in software testing not being exposed to accessibility testing and thinking that it’s very difficult to do. So for the past year, I’ve been educating myself on how to introduce accessibility testing to our teams.

Accessibility testing is not something new. It’s something that we, as testers, have been trying to do for many many years now. Yet until now, the number of inaccessible websites that we encounter are still very high. Most of us don’t think about accessibility testing so it ends up being forgotten. I also wrote about some of the misconceptions about accessibility testing in this blog post, Debunking Accessibility Testing Myths, in case you are interested to also read about it.

Test Automation University 🎉

So when the one and only Angie Jones approached me on LinkedIn during the early start of this year, I was really excited when she mentioned that there is an opportunity to become an instructor in Test Automation University (TAU)! We brainstormed ideas and I ended up suggesting a course about accessibility testing. Since it’s TAU, there will be a focus on automation. At the same time, I wanted to take this opportunity to also emphasise that while automation is great, it can only catch basic accessibility issues. So, human intervention is still very important when doing accessibility testing.

Test Automation for Accessibility

After around 4 months in the making, recording late nights and editing, I am super happy to share that my course, Test Automation for Accessibility, has been released! And.. it’s for free! If you’ve been meaning to learn the basics of accessibility testing, why it’s important and the benefits it can provide to your teams, then this course is for you.

The course is divided into following chapters:

  • Chapter 1: Introduction to Web Accessibility - a brief introduction to accessibility and to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
  • Chapter 2: Why Accessibility Testing is Important? - a look at some of the benefits of doing accessibility testing, how automated accessibility tests can help us and the importance of doing accessibility testing with real users.
  • Chapter 3: Web Accessibility Testing Checks - an overview of accessibility testing checks that you can start doing. You’ll be surprised how easy some of the checks are!
  • Chapter 4: Overview of Accessibility Testing Tools - a chapter focused on some of the popular tools out there for accessibility testing. It’s not by far the complete list but should help you get started.
  • Chapter 5: Exploring Axe-CLI - a more technical look on how you can run accessibility checks straight from your command line. Handy if you need to integrate it to your Continuous Integration pipelines.
  • Chapter 6: Setting up Cypress and Cypress-Axe - an overview on how to setup the Cypress-Axe plugin to help you write accessibility tests within your Cypress testing framework.
  • Chapter 7: Writing Accessibility Tests with Cypress-Axe - introducing commands that you can use to start writing accessibility tests and catch basic issues.
  • Chapter 8: Applitools Contrast Advisor - a look at how you can use Applitools to catch contrast issues on both text and non-text elements.

There’s also activities on most of the chapters to help you practice.

So if you want to get started with accessibility testing basics, have around an hour and 30 minutes to spare, earn 800 credits into your TAU account and a certification, head over now to TAU and take my course. Feedback is always welcome and I hope you enjoy the course!

December 15, 2020 ∙ testing thoughts accessibility