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It’s been a year since the European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into effect. The companies operating in the EU which had not taken accessibility seriously up to that point now have a legal obligation to ensure accessible digital experiences – in addition to the clear moral obligation.
You may work at or run such a company. If this is the case, you’ve likely undergone the process of optimizing your website for accessibility some time over the last year. Or maybe you’re just now starting it.
Logically, you begin with an automated accessibility audit. It shows that you got a 100/100, a perfect score – this means you’re all good, right? No accessibility issues, no need to dive deeper and take any additional measures to improve accessibility?
If only it were that straightforward. The vast majority of automated accessibility checks only uncover 25-35% of accessibility issues. The most pressing ones often go missed – not by the people they affect, though.
To make sure your website is really accessible to all users in whichever circumstance, you need to take measures that go beyond free audits and automated checks. Manual testing done by accessibility specialists will be essential to uncovering every potential issue and implementing accessible design.
Why you do need automated accessibility checks
It’s not that automated accessibility audits and checks aren’t valuable – far from it. They represent an essential starting point, especially in cases where you lack in-house accessibility expertise and would like to quickly gauge whether there are any critical issues that need immediate attention, and then develop the optimal plan for effectively addressing them.
Put simply, if an a11y issue gets flagged by an automated test, it’s likely a low hanging fruit and fixing it should be your highest priority. Leveraging automated tests to uncover these kinds of issues saves a lot of time compared to relying on manual reviewing for everything.
There are several useful free options when it comes to choosing the right tool for automated accessibility testing, such as:
- Deque’s Axe
- Google Lighthouse (best used in combination with the Unlighthouse CLI)
- Google PageSpeed Insights’ Accessibility
- WAVE – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools
Additionally, you can get a quick, painless and free automated test directly on the Agiledrop website. Just enter your desired URL and get an instant review of your site’s accessibility.
Where they fall short: automated a11y testing in practice
As mentioned above, however, despite their usefulness, these automated tests typically only catch up to 30% of actual issues. Agiledrop’s own two Web Accessibility Specialists tested and confirmed this on a few different websites:
- For one website, two different automated checks produced a perfect 100 score, but a manual check revealed 20 issues that needed addressing, several of them serious and even a few critical ones such as menu interaction. None of these were picked up by either of the two automated tests.
- Another website got a score of 92/100 when checked by different automated tools, with 3 serious issues identified. Yet manual testing of different pages produced less stelar results: from 17 to 32 accessibility issues, all of them either serious or critical. Despite the initial high score, even a quick look at the website revealed glaringly obvious issues such as poor color contrast on buttons.
Besides such scores not including all issues, there is an inherent misconception with how we view them: a score of 90/100 is good, right? That’s what we’re used to from our education. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than passable… right?
Let’s imagine 90% in a different context. Let’s say you went to a piano performance lasting 30 minutes, and 90% of that performance was excellent. That means that 10% – 3 full minutes – were not good; in the worst case scenario, they were poor. If a mistake lasts one second, that’s 180 mistakes. If it lasts half a second, it’s 360. If these aren’t small hiccups, so many mistakes would indicate that the performance was a disaster – despite the seemingly good 90% excellence.
Now, in this example, there’s not much that can be done with regards to salvaging the performance. Luckily, in the case of a 90% accessible website, there’s a clear starting point to resolving the core issues: performing manual checks in addition to automated tests.
Why manual accessibility testing is key
While automated tests are a crucial starting point for uncovering obvious issues, certain types of issues can only be discovered through proper manual testing. As our WAS Patricija puts it in a recent article, “whether a form error is associated with the right input, whether a modal traps focus correctly, whether a custom dropdown is navigable in a way a screen reader user can actually follow – these require manual testing”.
How to optimally perform manual accessibility testing
The most reliable way to manually test for accessibility issues is putting yourself in the shoes of users with different disabilities (i.e. “real users”), and use tools such as assistive technologies to get a first-hand experience of how specific disabilities actually affect users’ experience of your site.
Assistive technologies include tools such as screen readers and text-to-speech technology. In addition to these, techniques like keyboard navigation are also an essential element of manual testing, as is testing usability in circumstances that would produce a temporary disability – e.g. testing legibility on small screen sizes, testing color contrast in different lighting environments/conditions, etc.
If manual testing fails to include these and only tests the experience of users without any disabilities, it won’t really be that much more effective than any of the free automated tests discussed above.
This is one of the key reasons why having certified Web Accessibility Specialists on your team; they are keenly familiar with both the importance and the techniques of proper manual accessibility testing.
Test-driven development
Test-driven development is just generally one of the most reliable approaches to developing quality software that meets both stakeholder and usr expectations. One of the key principles of TDD is using automated and manual testing in tandem for optimal results.
Done right, test-driven development should naturally also cover testing for accessibility, including both automated and manual tests. For new websites, however, it’s an even better investment to just make accessibility a core part of the development process, which will also make any future testing much smoother.
Conclusion
If you want to test the accessibility of your website, starting with an automated check remains the right first step. Just don’t let seemingly favourable results from this initial test lull you into a false sense of security.
Make sure to embrace manual accessibility testing, ideally performed by accessibility experts who will also be able to fix the issues thus uncovered. In case you lack in-house experts, reach out to us and one of our certified accessibility specialists will get in touch with you and focus on your specific case.
