Site accessibility: what screen readers, etc to test against, and how?

Question

The web site that we're writing needs to be "Accessible". The trouble is, while we understand the general conepts (semantic latout, alt text on images, light on Javascript, etc etc), we don't really have much knowledge of what screen reader products or other accessible browser are actually on the market and/or in general use, nor how to test against them.

So the questions are:

• What products do we need to know about?
• Would it be sensible (or even useful) to get hold of them to test against?
• Are there any QA processes we should be looking at to assist us (we do a lot of automated browser testing [Selenium] to ensure we don't break anything for regular users; can we/should we do the same for screen readers?)

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Answer 1

See this question As the question implies if you want good screen reading testing you either need to hire someone to do the testing for you that has a lot of screen reader experience or invest the time in having developers and or QA learn a screen reader well. To my knolidge there is nothing like Selenium that can simulate how a screen reader handles a website. FOr general info on accessibility see http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/ This appears to have a lot of good information and covers all kinds of accessibility, not just blindness. For a list of tools to check html accessibility see http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete.html Although these tools will help they are not a substitute for screen reading testing. For a discussion of some of the problems with relying only on automated tools see http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/automated-tools.shtml

Answer 2

In addition to Jared's answer: For the non screen reader visual accessibility testing, I've found that a simple and easily available test tool is a gray scale printer. This will let you know (roughly) if you have enough contrast for those who have a form of color blindness or other issues with contrast, etc and whether you've snuck any images in that are relying too much on color for information. It's not the be all and end all, but it's an easy first test.

Answer 3

Since you're already using Selenium to test your site, you can easily integrate something like Continuum, which can scan a page for accessibility concerns that would be noticeable by someone using assistive technologies, into your existing test framework. There's API documentation if you'd like to roll your own solution, or free Java and JavaScript sample projects on webaccessibility.com you can use for inspiration.

As others have noted, automated accessibility testing isn't going to catch everything as nothing compares to manual testing done by experts, but it's a good idea to do some kind of automated testing just to cover your bases, and there are a wealth of technologies out there these days that can help you do that very easily.