Curious About Testing

[jazzyjj]

Hi everyone. With today being Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I'm curious whether anybody has tested either the main Dw site or their own journals and/or communities with Wave or any of the other automated tools out there? I don't know enough of the technical details of these tools, but based on my personal use case scenario Dw works great. To that end, I'm also curious whether people here prefer the automated testing tools, manual testing or a combination of both. Sorry if this is a repeat.
http://www.afb.org/blog/afb-blog/celebrating-global-accessibility-awareness-day-2016/12

Comments

[cesy]

The usual testing principle is a combination of both - automated is quick and easy for the things it's good at, but there are lots of things it will miss or that need human judgement.

[denise]

Yeah, automated testing tools are great at catching things like "did you forget to check the color contrast" or for checking the markup structure of a page, but really good accessibility is an art, not a science! Especially when you're dealing with multiple conflicting access needs -- like, the classic example is "some migraineurs get migraines from a page with a pure white background, some folks with low vision can't read text unless it's black text on white background".

The way we've done it has mostly been "start with the standards, but be willing to override the standards when a group of our actual users tell us that the standards are actively making their use of the site worse".