Hi Readers,
Good to be back here and sharing another interesting and insightful yet practical aspect of a topic that is highly relevant and indispensable. So, we plan to discuss how we can perform accessibility testing through simple steps. Let’s get to it.
Ways to Test WebSite Accessibility
- Use of High Contrast Mode : High contrast mode can be used to highlight the content of the website. When turned on, the high contrast mode highlights the content of the website automatically with the content turning white or yellow and the background turning black. Hence we can check the visibility of the content for various people and their special needs.
- By Not Accessing The Images : We need to also see that in the case where people are not seeing the image, are they still able to understand through text the same idea which the image was conveying? So, by turning off access we can run a check for making sure that the text justifies the content that is presented through an image as at times either images take too long to come up or some people might have issues with decoding information from images for any reason.
- Checking The Captions : We need to have captions that are descriptive, which helps in cases where the image or video might not be of use or might be slow or delayed and hence the descriptive cation might serve the purpose if need be.
- Disabling CSS : CSS defines the style, look, and feel of the document and website. By disabling the CSS, we can check the content of the documents and various properties like color, size, font, table representations, etc to ensure the readability of the content.
- Keyboard Only Operations: Making a system where usage of just keyboard suffices and provides access to the website is a wonderful advantage for people with difficulties in their motor skills and we must try to ensure the same. Also, a lot many times people with vision issues are rather better at keyboard usage over a period of time over usage of the mouse. Hence it addresses issues like focus indicators, navigation orders, and inaccessible custom widgets, etc.
- Provide Accessible Labels: For each interactive element on the website, there should be a visible text explaining its actions or purpose. Like, for a text box, it should have a short label description of the data it is designed to take from user input or a relationship description of options and value in a radio button or checkbox.
- Font Sizing : Common problems here to address are that the default font size isn’t too small and fonts are expandable. As per the guidelines, we have to ensure that the font shouldn’t be smaller than 9 pixels and they are zoomable up to 200%.
- Bypass Navigation: Sometimes reaching to main content isn’t easy and requires lots of navigations. There should be an anchor or skip link to bypass navigation steps to reach the main content. Reaching to the top of the page is one classic example to example this point.
- Content Scaling : We must Zoom in and out the Content and Images to ensure it is readable and fits the screen.
The above-mentioned points are the manual methods we need to be adapting while testing for accessibility. Basically, we need sensitivity and technology both in trying to make a system accessible to people at large with varied requirements, needs, or constraints.
We must consider building the apps and websites which fulfill the criterion set by W3C and should think on the lines that we are mentioning below.
- Simple language must be used as people with cognitive disabilities shall also be able to make the most out of the content.
- The text should not have too large paragraphs as this becomes difficult for people with vision difficulties as they use an audio understanding and try to understand the info provided by mostly memorizing it.
- Presence of pictures as a substitute to text is important for people who are literacy challenged.
- Descriptive link text is critical.
- Hyperlinks must be accessible by using the tab key.
- Use of Marquee text is a big no.
- Scan of other issues like audio, transcripts for media, etc.
- Avoid unwanted popups as handling them is trouble while reading the webpages.
In the upcoming article in our Accessibility Testing article series, we will touch base upon some of the tools using which we can perform accessibility testing on our website.
Originally published at https://www.qekafe.com on October 5, 2020.
