Testing for Accessibility

Don’t think of digital accessibility as a project, but rather an ongoing process that ensures that users with disabilities can navigate, perceive, and interact with your content.

Assess your website

Conduct automated and manual assessments of your website for conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.

Evaluation checklists:

The following checklists can help you through the process of evaluating your website:

• A11y Top 10 Checklist for Developers
• A11y Top 10 Checklist for Content Creators
• WebAIM Quick Reference – Testing Web Content for Accessibility
• Easy Checks–A First Review of Web Accessibility from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• WCAG 2 Checklist by WebAIM

Automated testing

When testing your website, automated website evaluation tools are a great place to start. Automated tools like browser plug-ins can identify 30% to 40% of accessibility issues on a site.

If you are a web developer, use a code linter to automatically flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and other coding defects during development. Free accessibility linters are available for a wide variety of code editors and programming languages.

Manual testing

The remaining 60% of issues can only be found by conducting manual keyboard and screen reader tests and applying human judgment.

When conducting manual testing, ensure that:

• All content and functionality is accessible using only the keyboard
• The standard keys used for navigation listed under “Keyboard-only testing” work as expected
• Users can bypass content that is repeated on multiple pages either with skip links or proper use of HTML5 sectioning elements
• All links, buttons, controls, and non-presentational images include accessible text (e.g., alt text and meaningful link text)
• Multimedia content includes accurate captions, transcripts, and/or audio descriptions
• Focus order matches the visual order
• Color alone is not used to convey meaning and colors have sufficient color contrast
• Every interactive item has a visible focus indicator
• There are no keyboard traps
• Content is organized with a properly formatted and ordered heading structure.
• Any content that plays or rotates automatically, such as videos or carousels,  can be paused or stopped by the user
• Expandable elements, such as flyouts and dropdown menus can be closed automatically or with a keyboard command.
• Tables are used to present tabular data, not for layout purposes, and include semantic header rows or columns
• All content is responsive and reflows without horizontal scrolling and loss of functionality regardless of screen size by zooming your webpage to 400%. When a user zooms into a webpage by 400%, this is effectively equivalent to viewing the page on a phone or mobile device.

Keyboard-only testing

Because people with visual or certain mobility impairments are unable to use a mouse, it is crucial to test the keyboard accessibility of your website. To conduct keyboard only testing use the following keys to navigate your website.

• Tab: Navigate interactive elements (links, form controls, etc.)
• Shift + Tab: Navigate backwards
• Enter: Activate links or buttons, submit most forms
• Spacebar: Activate checkboxes and buttons, expand a select menu, or scroll the window
• Arrow keys: Navigate radio buttons, select/dropdown menus, sliders, tab panels, tree menus, etc.
• Esc: should close/dismiss all dialogs and menus

Screen reader testing

Assess your site using a screen reader. There are a variety of screen readers to choose from, and each takes a while to learn and configure before you can use it efficiently to evaluate the accessibility of digital content. Configurations include hotkeys, voice selection, rate of speech, and more.

The Center for Digital Accessibility (CDA) staff provides primary support for screen reader testing. We also contract with Access Living, a Chicago-based company, to provide testing by people with disabilities. If you need screen reader help or training, please contact the CDA.

Decide whether to remediate, replace, or retire inaccessible content.

Contact the UChicago Website Resource Center for valuable information on setting up a new website or updating an existing website. Resources are provided for website hosting, domain name requests, UChicago web standards, and technical support.

Remediate accessibility issues

Tackle the most serious barriers and critical content first. We recommend that you focus first on high priority issues:

• Direct feedback from visitors to your website: Always respond in a timely way to requests for access to your content.
• Impact for people with disabilities: Address issues that prevent users from perceiving important content or completing critical tasks.
• Prevalence of repeat issues: You may be able to fix issues that are prevalent throughout your site all at once by tweaking your content or updating a few lines of code.
• Ease and speed of repair: Achieve quick results by tackling issues that can be fixed with minimal effort.

Iteration

After remediating your website, assess it again to verify that accessibility issues have been fixed. Repeat the cycle periodically to ensure that updated content continues to meet accessibility guidelines.

Still have questions? Contact the CDA to request a consultation.