You might be surprised to know that currently, 650M people or simply put 10% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability [http://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/]. With the growing use of software in all walks of life, this is a major segment of the population that cannot be left behind. Disabilities and associated accessibility problems could fall under any of the following 4 categories:
1. Visual Impairments
2. Mobility Impairments
3. Auditory Impairments
4. Cognitive Impairments
Like any other area of product development, special attention needs to be given to accommodate product usage for these categories of users too, by specifically incorporating their needs in the product’s architecture, implementation and quality assurance. Identifying lack of support in these areas later in the game will make it very difficult to fix them, leading to a possible situation of not supporting a large set of users for your product. So, what can you as a tester do proactively, to ensure comprehensive accessibility support for your product from the early stages?
1. Take time to understand the Accessibility Guidelines and Standards set by governmental agencies and consortiums including W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0, Section 508
2. Understand Accessibility from a Usage standpoint and discuss your inputs with your product team upfront: If your team has done usability tests in the past leveraging real end users or is open to allowing you interact with real time users with accessibility issues, grab the opportunity. Interact with such users, observe them play around with the product and carefully make note of the kind of issues they face from a UI, functionality, usability angles. If you have a usability expert on the team work with him/her to analyze your observations. These findings go a long way in helping design the right product. Even if you do not have a product to demo as yet, talk to such users to understand their pain points and what they would like to see in a product such as yours
3. Proactively think of any collaborations you can work out with organizations that support people with accessibility issues to elicit ongoing valuable feedback from such users
4. Detailed Manual Accessibility Testing: Some content simply cannot be tested using automated accessibility validators/tools. As an example, an image of a Tiger could have its alt text set to ‘Mouse’ which is clearly inappropriate. There is no automated tool yet that could recognize the contents of an image and determine whether the alt text was correct. Ensure you chalk out a clear test plan with areas that you want to cover manually to cover the accessibility guidelines extensively
5. Automated Accessibility Testing: There are several tools that scan through the source code as well as analyze the application UI to report core accessibility issues. Such findings greatly supplement the manual test efforts in reaching out to all corners of the code, that may sometimes be very difficult in manual code reviews
6. Use of the VPAT checklist – The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a great resource for the entire product development team, especially the test team. Developed in 2009 and owned by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), it details out the requirements for Section 508 to accommodate for accessibility in the product under development. This checklist is almost like a readymade set of items to verify, that is available for the tester. He/she should proactively ensure this list is discussed upfront with the business, design and development teams so they are all on the same page on accommodating them in the product. This VPAT when included in your accessibility test efforts, is almost like a certification for your product’s compliance with Section 508
Think about the points listed above. Some of them are pure science on specifics that need to be accommodated, some of them are pure art in terms of working with end users to elicit usability feedback, and some are a combination of art and science with your hands on accessibility testing efforts. Arrive at the right balance in your overall accessibility test efforts and collaborate with your product development team and end users in creating a product that is accessible by one and all!
One of our senior testers, Himani, recently presented on this topic at the QAI STC conference in Bangalore and of the 25+ papers chosen for the “Best of Best” Paper awards, her’s closed in as the second runner up, which not only emphasized the depth of her content but the importance the industry is attributing to this overall topic. For more information on her presentation or any of the points mentioned above, please write to us at rajini.padmanaban@qainfotech.net
