Empowering Accessibility: The Power of Automation Tools?

Today, we are living in a digital world. Weather we want to book cab, movie ticket, flight ticket, order groceries, gadgets, or anything else we can do it digitally without going anywhere. But

does everyone have this privilege? Answer is 'No'.

Unless we make our digital content accessible for people with different abilities, it will not be of any use for this 15% of world population.

Is it very difficult and time consuming to develop accessible applications?. Again, the answer is no.

By using automation tools like AXE, Accessibility Insight, Wave, Site improve it can be done quite easily.

Let me share some benefits that accessibility tools provide us:

a. Quickly check high level accessibility health: Whenever I encounter a new web page, it makes me curious to know about its accessibility health. In such scenario, I quickly run automation tool, have a glance at the variety of issues along with counts for each category. This gives me a fair idea about accessibility health of that page. Example-  if there are issues like missing alt text, input elements not associated with labels, incorrect heading order or colour contrast issues it means that it is lacking on accessibility front. 

b. Test complex/ large volume of pages: As an accessibility consultant, I frequently come across large volume of pages or complex pages. It is extremely time consuming to go for manual testing of these pages. Here, automation toolsare of great help. Just with few clicks, we not only get list of issues but also a defect report is generated which can be directly sent to developers for fixing of issues.

c. To find 40% of accessibility issues: With a rich experience in accessibility testing, I think that automation tools can report.Around 40% of accessibility issues. This is a significant number. With just few clicks, we can get 40% of issues and then for the remaining 60%, we need to perform manual testing. So, almost half of the work is done in no time. 

d. Developers can use automation tools to find/ fix issues while performing coding/ unit testing: Not only testers can use automation tools for finding accessibility bugs, but developers also can use these tools while coding. This will help them to find deficiencies instantly and fix them before releasing features to testing team.  These tools not only provide list of gaps but also highlights error element on page and failing source code. Recommendations to fix these defects is also provided. 

e. Integrate accessibility automation tests with CI/CD: Accessibility testing libraries that work with your unit, integration, or end-to-end test cases such as Axe-Core and PA11y can integrate with a development team’s specific testing library, and become a test case for each page, or component that is tested. This helps to make sure that existing code is not broken with frequent releases happening across the application. To summarize, if we want to quickly get an idea of high-level accessibility issues, test volume of pages, get instant 40% of issues, empower developers to test and fix accessibility issues and want to integrate accessibility test cases with Ci/ CD we should 100% go for automation tools.

#Accessibility #AutomationTools #DigitalInclusion