Testing times

Recently, we’ve seen so-called experts saying that you don’t need to conduct accessibility tests. Our own experience working with leading websites tells us otherwise.

If you’re committed to making your website usable with assistive devices, accessibility testing is essential. An audit can weed out obvious problems and can check your site against the guidelines. But there can be a gulf between technical compliance with the guidelines and a website that is truly accessible and usable.

We’ve been working for over a year with one of the UK’s leading banks. Through accessibility audits, we were able to coach the company to achieving AA compliance. That means the site satisfied all the priority 1 & 2 checkpoints, which should remove significant barriers to accessing web documents.

When we carried out accessibility testing, we found there was still work to be done. There were many issues that the guidelines did not address and some of these turned out to be major barriers. The testing showed that:

• Users of screen magnifiers found it hard to navigate pages that had large areas of white space between content, or between text and the related buttons. Users were forced to scroll around the screen excessively – taking much longer to perform simple actions.
• Text that stretched to fill the page was hard for people with dyslexia and users of screen magnifiers to read. While users could have reduced the size of the window, they usually didn’t think to do that. It made for a tiring and frustrating experience.
• The screen reader Jaws, when used in table mode, couldn’t identify links that were also table headings. This meant that screen reader users lost part of the page functionality altogether.

An accessibility audit is vital to avoid tests being wasted on problems that can be quickly spotted by an expert. But once companies have achieved an appropriate level of technical compliance, they should consider testing a natural progression. Apart from identifying new or overlooked problems, testing makes clear just how significant these barriers are for people attempting to conduct business online.