Accessibility Testing: Making Websites & Mobile Apps Usable for All

Nowadays, ensuring digital accessibility is no longer statutory but an essential aspect of creating an inclusive online environment. Companies can offer equal opportunities to use the digital world with accessible websites and mobile apps to all users, including those with disabilities. Such platforms not only portray a good brand image but also ensure that all users have equal opportunities to access, perceive, and facilitate digital content with ease. That is where accessibility testing ensures that a digital platform meets the basic standards and is employable by any user.

In this article, we share with you the value of accessibility testing: what it is, its main principles, barriers, and how crowd testing can be used to create a digital platform that is usable and inclusive for everyone.

What is Accessibility Testing?

Accessibility testing is a means of testing websites, mobile apps, and other digital platforms for their usability by people with different kinds of disabilities, including visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments. Its principle’s backbone is encoded in the acronym POUR, which stands for:

• Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive, regardless of their disabilities.
• Operable: This interface shall be usable by users, including being keyboard-navigable. 
• Understandable: It has to be readable, foreseeable, and understandable. 
• Robust: Content must be compatible with various assistive technologies.

The primary purpose of user accessibility testing is to identify and resolve barriers that may hinder access to content. This focus on accessibility will assist businesses in ensuring that they meet all legal and ethical requirements regarding accessibility, which include, but are not limited to, the WCAG guidelines, Section 508, and ADA compliance in the United States. 

• WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines): Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), these guidelines provide a shared standard for web content accessibility. They ensure that websites and applications are accessible to people with disabilities.
• Section 508: Part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 508 requires federal agencies to make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. This includes websites, software, and hardware used by federal agencies.
• ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act): This civil rights law prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places open to the public. It ensures that digital platforms are accessible to everyone.

By adhering to these regulations, businesses can avoid legal penalties and ensure their digital platforms are inclusive and accessible to all users.

Key Aspects of Accessibility Testing

• Keyboard Navigation & Screen Readers: Many people with disabilities navigate via keyboard, while others use screen reader compatibility software that can interpret onscreen content. Testing for accessibility ensures such users will be able to navigate easily.

• Text Alternatives for Images: Non-text elements, like images, must have descriptive alt-text that screen readers can read out as text so that visually impaired users comprehend the content.

• Color Contrast & Visual Design: High color contrast viewed in the light significantly enhances readability, especially for users with visual impairments. Testing the color contrasts avoids problems for people who need help distinguishing colors well.

• Video & Audio Content: When there is video or audio content, it is paramount to provide resources such as captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions. This will help hearing-impaired users to have equal opportunity to interact with the content and promote inclusion.

• Form Labeling & Error Identification: It ensures that forms are clearly labeled and that error messages are clear and easy to understand. With accessibility in forms and error messages, people with disabilities can perform some activities without confusing themselves or having frustrating experiences.

Common Accessibility Barriers

Different disabilities can create different kinds of access challenges. Common barriers include:

• Visual impairments: Many users face challenges due to poor color contrast, missing alternative text for images, or content incompatible with the screen.
• Hearing impairments: Users with hearing disabilities may have problems without captions in an audio or video format.
• Cognitive disabilities: Individuals who might have issues with complex content, confusing navigation, or non-intuitive interfaces raise accessibility issues.
• Motor disabilities: Users with limited motor control will often use a keyboard or other assistive devices for navigation, so the site must support a keyboard and similar input.

These barriers represent the need for manual accessibility testing to identify areas for improvement and ensure better and more accessible user experiences.

Key Accessibility Testing Areas Addressed by Crowd Testing

The greatest contribution of crowd testing is the real users testing for accessibility

on digital platforms in a natural environment. Some critical areas of accessibility that crowd testing helps address include:

• Visual Accessibility: With crowd testing, visually impaired testers can conduct color contrast tests to ensure that information on the screen will be compatible with a screen reader or enlarging fonts to provide readable content to partially or fully blind users.
• Hearing Accessibility: Hard-of-hearing users check whether audio and video materials have captions, transcripts, or sign language interpretations. They give valuable feedback on the product’s usability.
• Motor Accessibility: This refers to a website or application that supports keyboard navigation and voice commands. Limited motor control testers assess how well it is possible to move through a website and interact with its content.
• Cognitive Accessibility: Testers with cognitive challenges review the clarity of the content and how understandable it is in a simple layout to show that it can be used by everyone.

Why Crowd Testing is Ideal for Accessibility?

Why Crowd Testing is Ideal for Accessibility?

 Crowd testing is fast becoming a known technique to test for accessibility due to several major advantages, including:

• Diversity of Testers: In crowd testing, services of people with all kinds of disabilities, devices, and settings are employed. This ensures that any accessibility testing website undergoes a wider look and is more inclusive, making it more accessible and robust in user accessibility testing.
• Real-World Conditions: Unlike lab-based testing, crowd testing represents real-life environments and captures the real user experience. In other words, testers review a website or app under precisely the same conditions as actual users, which makes any accessibility-related testing applicable and practical.
• Scalability: Speed: Crowd-testing allows for rapid accessibility beta testing across all platforms, which is beneficial for urgent results without sacrificing quality. Scalability enables organizations to adjust resources based on the development life cycle stage, ensuring efficient resource use and flexibility. This combination makes crowd-testing an invaluable tool in modern software development.
• Unbiased Feedback: Authentic responses will come from testers with diverse backgrounds. Crowd testing depicts an external outlook, which may unveil issues internal teams might never notice.
• Inclusion of Disabled Users: One of the most valuable elements of crowd-testing is leveraging real users with disabilities. Their insights enable companies to find and fix real accessibility testing best practices, thus making accessibility improvements based on real experiences.

Conclusion

Accessibility lies at the heart of making digital experiences inclusive and benefits all users, not just those with impairments. Accessible websites and mobile applications are a pleasure to use; they create an easy way for anyone to interact with digital content. By making their products and services accessible, companies will not only be answering the demands of legislation but also showing a sense of corporate social responsibility. This will enhance their brand image and earn them the trust of a bigger and more diverse pool of users.

It’s crucial to understand that accessibility isn’t just a best practice; it’s a legal requirement in many places. Standards like WCAG, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and ADA in the United States legally require any digital platform to ensure accessibility for all users. Businesses that fail to follow these regulations risk fines or lawsuits.

This process is where crowd testing comes in because it not only enlists real users with various types of disabilities to identify and fix accessibility issues in natural conditions but also for the value of feedback. Companies can get true, unbiased feedback to make corrections that might not come forward during standard tests.

Digital accessibility testing isn’t an option but an integral part of development today. It requires thorough and rigorous testing to ensure your software meets the highest standards and reaches a broader audience. Contact us to see how we can help you enhance the accessibility of your digital platforms!