With 1.3 billion people worldwide having some form of disability, digital accessibility is a necessity. This blog explores the best website testing methods to take in order for everyone to be able to easily access the web.
It has taken a long time to get to the stage for people to stand up and take notice of the need for products and services to be accessible, but groundbreaking advancements are finally happening across industries. Digital accessibility is no longer something that can be ignored, nor is it just a ‘nice to have feature’ or ‘checkbox’ exercise, with more countries adopting legislation to enforce the necessary changes to create a fair and equal world.
Even within the next few months businesses who provide services or products across Europe will all legally have to ensure that these are accessible, and it won’t be long before more places follow suit, and rightly so. Due to these changes in law, many organisations are now needing to perform accessibility audits of their digital platforms to meet the required web standards.
By doing so, they can avoid:
- Hefty fines.
- Legal action.
- A damaged reputation.
- Loss of custom and income.
Along with reaping many rewards due to the exponential spending power that the purple pound brings.
How to choose a trusted digital agency to perform accessibility testing for you
Although many are now making these positive steps forward to become inclusive, often due to a lack of knowledge, mistakes are being made in the audit testing process. These mistakes are not only from in-house teams, but also from agencies who claim to provide these services. So, it’s important to do your research before choosing the provider.
Here’s a few considerations to ensure you choose a trusted accessibility agency:
- Choose a credible company.
- Check their accessibility experience in the industry.
- Review their case studies and ask for testimonials.
- Enquire if they perform manual usability testing and not only automated tests.
- See if they can provide you with live demonstrations with assistive technologies as to why errors may be occurring and what you’ll receive within your audit report.
- Find out the next steps. Do they provide an accessibility statement, can they perform the web development changes for you, can they provide consultancy or accessibility training for in-house teams?
All of which, HeX Productions can guarantee for you. We can even give you a free overview through our accessibility health check to get you started.
Mistakes that developers make when performing website audit testing
It’s amazing that people are finally prioritising inclusivity and starting to perform testing across their websites. However, there is no cutting corners when it comes to digital accessibility. Understandably, if you aren’t ‘in the know’ about what is needed to meet web standards you may be tempted by automated testing tools and there’s no denying that these can be very useful. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy and there isn’t an ‘out the box’ solution that can ensure you meet all of the desired criteria in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. The only way to assess the accessibility of your website is through manual testing.
By all means utilise automated scans to help to run basic audits across your platform. These are great at finding errors with site items, such as incorrect heading levels. However, even if it flags up something like missing alt text descriptions on an image, software alone can’t examine the other images that do have alt text added to see how a description is written and if they are providing the right detail. That’s the difference in needing human oversight.
Other areas that automated scans can’t assess is:
- If content is written in a user-friendly way.
- The web page structure or if it is presented in a logical manner.
- If colour contrast ratios are sufficient between background colours and foreground text.
- If hover states are present on site elements.
- If captions are included on videos.
- The safety of a platform, such as protecting users from content that may trigger seizures.
- Ambiguous link text providing no context for users.
- All areas of the codebase. Often, developers only assess markup and labels on site elements, hoping this will fix accessibility issues, but they do not review the affects ARIA can have on the user. However, our experts frequently discover that these have been used incorrectly, with broken references, or left out entirely.
The need to use assistive technology to assess a website’s usability
Most developers when building web pages will assess how the content performs across varying browsers and, hopefully, screen resolutions as well. If you are aiming towards achieving an accessible platform, then you need to consider how different user needs can be met through the varying technology they may use. Therefore, you should also be utilising assistive technology devices and software, such as a screen reader or a keyboard, to assess the usability of a site. Using this method enables you to see first-hand what it is like for someone with a disability to access, navigate, and interact with your platform.
You may find eye-opening results, such as:
- Not being able to bypass the main navigation with a keyboard to even gain access to any information within your site.
- A screen reader user not being able to complete a booking or being able to navigate to the correct page in the first place due to link text providing no context.
- Someone using speech input software to complete and submit a form.
The list is endless, and without performing manual tests will go untraced. In turn, resulting in you not being compliant and potentially breaking the law.
How HeX can support you
Our team are experts in digital accessibility and are leaders in the industry. If you require support with your audit testing, there’s no one better to turn to than our knowledgeable accessibility web developers.
Not only do we perform both automated, manual, and technical reviews of your platform; we’ll show you first hand with live demonstrations why these errors are causing a problem for your disabled customers. What’s more, we’ll provide you with a comprehensive roadmap of required changes in a robust report and are hand to support you in making these alterations and becoming inclusive for all.
