Accessibility testing

Sometimes we would like to know quickly if a web page or a web site is accessible. Accurately determining accessibility is not a quick process, but there are some questions we can ask to figure out in a matter of minutes if our site is mostly accessible.

In the following you can read a list of questions which will help you determine if your site contains any of the most frequent errors. What you should be looking for is if you can answer with "yes" to any of the questions. If the answer is "no", most likely you will need to make your site more accessible.

The questions are designed so that they are easy to answer without having too much technical knowledge about web design, web development or accessibility.

Don't forget to download our free web accessibility workbook

During my consulting practice, many times I hear that a site was speaking with JAWS, so it must be accessible/WCAG conformant/Section 508 compliant. In this article I will show how JAWS works, when can we use it for testing, and why testing with JAWS or any screen reader only, we cannot establish the accessibility of a web site. In addition, you can read about JAWS scripting.

Often times we are asked to determine to what percentage is our web site accessible. While this measurement helps us fill in a questionaire, in itself it does not allow us to learn much about the extent of accessibility. This article will explain why we should not measure accessibility in percentage and what other ways we can use to provide a more accurate estimate.

There are two major approaches to testing the accessibility of web pages. The older one is manual accessibility testing, using a browser, a text editor and our best judgment. The newer method is the use of automated web accessibility testing tools. This article will explore the benefits of both approaches and will suggest how to combine both methods to achieve better results in a shorter amount of time.