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Category: Testing

Automated Web Accessibility Testing Tools Are Not Judges

Recently social media has been abuzz regarding an article titled “ITIF: 92% of Top Federal Websites Fail to Meet Security, Speed, Accessibility Standards” – and for good reason. The article cites a study by ITIF which details rampant failings of websites of the US Government. American taxpayers, being both the audience and source of funding …

Should you use more than one automated accessibility testing tool?

If you’re already aware of Betteridge’s Law, then you know the answer already. There are some that would argue that you need to use multiple tools because automated accessibility tools can’t find everything and because each tool takes its own approach to testing – including what they specifically test for. This sounds spot on, but …

Everything you know about accessibility testing is wrong (Part 4)

…how many bigger issues have we missed wasting our time fixing this kind of crap? @thebillygregory Literally every single audit report I’ve ever done includes issues relating to the following: Missing alt attributes for images Missing explicit relationships between form fields and their labels Tables without headers or without explicit relationships between header cells and …

Everything you know about accessibility is wrong (Part 3)

In the previous post in this series, I ended with a discussion that “current automatic accessibility testing practices take place at the wrong place and wrong time and is done by the wrong people” but really this applies to all accessibility testing. Of course every organization is different, but my experience substantiates the statement quite …

Everything you know about accessibility testing is wrong (part 2)

In Everything you know about accessibility testing is wrong (part 1) I left off talking about automated accessibility testing tools. It is my feeling that a tool of any kind absolutely must deliver on its promise to make the user more effective at the task they need the tool to perform. As a woodworker, I …

Everything you know about accessibility testing is wrong (part 1)

My first experience with accessibility and, therefore, accessibility testing, came from Bobby. In 1995, CAST launched Bobby as a free public service to make the burgeoning World Wide Web more accessible to individuals with disabilities. Over the next decade, Bobby helped novice and professional Web designers analyze and make improvements to millions of Web pages. …

The End User Uber Alles or, you got your reality in my idealism

As a web developer, one of the biggest sources of frustration is developing a website that works across the wide array of user agents and operating systems the visitor may be using. The web standards movement was supposed to “fix” that. It did make good progress and then CSS3, HTML5, and HTML5 multimedia and mobile …