What Is Accessibility Testing?

Accessibility testing is your friend. Do you know how you always try to make digital content more accessible? Do you want to ensure that it's easy for people with disabilities to read, use, and interact with? Well, that's accessibility testing! It's all about ensuring that your digital content meets the needs of people with disabilities. That means if you have a website, you should ensure it works on screen readers for blind people. Or, if your email is full of images and links, ensure it's easy for them to be read aloud by screen readers. When you do accessibility testing before launch, you can ensure that all your content is accessible before launching it! This way, no one gets left out or has trouble accessing what they need from your site or app. In the past, accessibility testing was essentially a manual process. An expert would analyze the site and its content, looking for issues that would make it problematic or impossible for people with disabilities to use. Today, automated testing tools can quickly assess a website's accessibility. However, many of these tools cannot evaluate the general user experience from various perspectives (such as how well pages have been optimized for screen readers). And even if an automated tool does provide this type of information, it may not be able to flag pages that require additional attention. A hybrid approach that uses both automated test tools and manual methodologies often provides the most helpful assessment. A website, for example, would be evaluated for criteria such as how well pages have been optimized for screen readers and flagged if further action is required by human testers who can look at each flagged page in detail and determine whether or not it should be fixed immediately or left alone until later on when there is time available to make changes more quickly.