Accessibility Testing

 

Statistics:

·         Over 4 million people in Australia have some form of disability. That's nearly 1 in 5 people.

·         19% of men, and 18% of women have disability.

·         43% of people over 55 years have one or more disabilities.

·         2.2 million Australians of working age (15 – 64 years) have disability.

·         1 in 6 Australians are affected by hearing loss. There are approximately 30,000 Deaf Auslan users with total hearing loss.

·         Vision Australia estimates there are currently 357,000 people in Australia who are blind or have low vision.

·         In Australia, about 8% of males and 0.4% of females suffer colour blindness.

·         An estimated 10% of the population has dyslexia. That’s more than two million Australians (Source: Dyslexia Australia).

·         Employment:

Australia’s employment rate for on people with disability (47.75% in 2012) is on par with developed countries like Canada (49% in 2011), United Kingdom (48.9% in 2012), Luxembourg (48% in 2011), New Zealand (45% in 2013), Denmark (43.90% in 2013), Norway (43% in 2013).

Disability Type	% of Population/# of people
Blindness/low vision	357,000
Deafness	30,000
Color Blindness	8% of males and 0.4% of females
Dyslexia	10%

Accessibility Testing:

Accessibility Testing is a subset of usability testing, and it is performed to ensure that the application being tested is usable by people with disabilities like hearing, colour-blindness, old age and other disadvantaged groups.

People with disabilities use assistive technology which helps them in operating a software product.

Speech Recognition Software - It will convert the spoken word to text , which serves as input to the computer. Screen reader software - Used to read out the text that is displayed on the screen  Screen Magnification Software- Used to enlarge the monitor and make reading easy for vision-impaired users. Special keyboard made for the users for easy typing who have motor control difficulties.

Why Accessibility Testing:

• Cater to market for Disabled People.
• Abide by Accessibility Legislations
• Avoid Potential Law Suits

Following are the legal acts by various governments -

·         United States: Americans with Disabilities Act - 1990

·         United Kingdom: Disability Discrimination Act - 1995

·         Australia: Disability Discrimination Act - 1992

·         Ireland : Disability Act of 2005

In the past, Fortune 500 companies have been sued because their products were not disabled friendly. Here a few prominent cases

·         National Federation for the Blind (NFB) vs Amazon (2007)

·         Sexton and NFB vs Target (2007)

·         NFB Vs AOL settlement (1999)

It's best to create products which support disabled and avoid potential lawsuits.

What is WCAG:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general. Also, WCAG has released different version. The latest is WCAG 2.0. Also, there are different level A, AA, AAA, basically these are the grading which needs to be fulfilled. But what level should be fulfilled that depends upon project and organization. There are certain tools available in the market, with their help Accessibility testing could be implemented.

WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific

• Guideline 1: Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
• Guideline 2: Don’t rely on colour alone
• Guideline 3: Use markup and style sheets, and do so properly
• Guideline 4: Clarify natural language usage
• Guideline 5: Create tables that transform gracefully
• Guideline 6: Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
• Guideline 7: Ensure user control of time sensitive content changes
• Guideline 8: Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces
• Guideline 9: Design for device independence
• Guideline 10: User interim solutions
• Guideline 11: Use W3C technologies and guidelines
• Guideline 12: Provide context and orientation information
• Guideline 13: Provide clear navigation mechanisms
• Guideline 14: Ensure that documents are clear and simple

Each of these, in total 65 WCAG 1.0 checkpoints has an assigned priority level based on the checkpoint's impact on accessibility:

• Priority 1: Web developers must satisfy these requirements, otherwise it will be impossible for one or more groups to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as A.
• Priority 2: Web developers should satisfy these requirements, otherwise some groups will find it difficult to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as AA or Double-A.
• Priority 3: Web developers may satisfy these requirements to make it easier for some groups to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as AAA or Triple-A.

   Manual Testing:

1.       Screen Reader + No mouse: Screen reader will narrate word by word if you enter something or in the text box. Similarly, if there is link it will pronounce it as a link, for Button it will pronounce it as a button. So that a Blind person can easily identify things. Now if a website is poorly designed and developed, then it might be possible (it generally happens) that jaws would not be able to narrate correct content which in turn result for inaccessibility for Blind Person. This case covers test for users who cannot use mouse or who are blind.

 Steps:

1.       Install NVDA screen reader (or any other) and plug off the mouse.

2.       Start from the login page and traverse through the entire website.

3.       Check various aspects such as:

·         Attaching files

·         Validation pop-ups

·         Error messages

·         Appropriate message when mandatory fields are not filled

·         Navigation to a submit button doesn’t automatically performs action, instead requires pressing the button.

·         PDF documents can be read by the screenreader.

2.       Turn on High Contrast mode: In the Windows operating system, High Contrast Mode allows Low Vision users, users with light sensitivity, and sometimes users with Dyslexia a convenient means of improving their ability to successfully use the computer. Windows High Contrast Mode changes the foreground and background colors to create higher contrast. Colors on the site are essentially removed entirely. All background is black and all foreground text is a significantly brighter color such as white or yellow (users can customize this).  With High Contrast Mode turned on, interact with the site.

3.       Blinking: Ensure that any element on the page doesn’t blink more than 3 times/second. Some people are susceptible to seizures caused by strobing, flickering, or flashing effects. This kind of seizure is sometimes referred to as a photoepileptic seizure because it is caused by pulses of light (hence the prefix "photo") interacting with the eye's light-receptive neurons and the body's central nervous system.

4.       Zoom: People with vision problem would like to zoom text of website to make it comfortable for them. So a website should be designed in such a manner that if enlarging it, its layout is not breakable when zooming the text.

5.       Consistency: Check consistency of the web elements. For instance if a search icon appears on more than one page in the website, the tooltip or description of the icon should speak the same text on every occurrence. Consistency is what makes a website professional and also, people with vision disability tend to remember their actions and elements in the website, a different text for the same element can make it hard for them to use the website.

6.       Skip Navigation: Keyboard and screen reader users generally must navigate a long list of navigation links, sub-lists of links, corporate icons, site searches, and other elements before ever arriving at the main content. This is particularly difficult for users with some forms of motor disabilities. Without some sort of system for bypassing the long list of links, some users are at a huge disadvantage. Consider users with no arm movement, who use computers by tapping their heads on a switch or that use a stick in their mouth to press keyboard keys. Requiring users to perform any action perhaps 100s of times before reaching the main content is simply unacceptable. In effect, sighted users have a built-in "skip navigation" mechanism: their eyes. They can also bypass the many links before the main content and click directly on the link they want with the mouse. 

7.       Captions or Transcripts: If you have media on your site, check for captions, transcripts, and other possible alternatives. Wherever you have media:

·         Are there captions on the video directly or is there a control in the player that turns on/ off captions?

·         Is there an alternative version with audio description or a control in the player that turns on/ off audio description?

·         For videos with a lot of dialog, is there a text transcript on the page or link close to the video player that goes to a transcript?

References:

http://www.and.org.au/pages/disability-statistics.html
https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/appendixB.html
https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/conformance.html#conformance-reqs
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#time-limits
https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y/wiki/HTML-CodeSniffer-Rules
http://usability.com.au/2013/04/accessible-forms-1-labels-and-identification/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA
https://www.gov.uk/