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Industry Practices for Accessibility Testing

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From: Akshi Kakar
Date: Feb 9, 2015 2:43PM

Hello,

We have been updating our code to make our web application accessible and in doing so have been testing with JAWS 16 and Windows Eyes. With some of our recent work on adding long descriptions to images, we noticed that the "longdesc" attribute is not read correctly in IE with JAWS if the attribute refers to a location on the same page. However, the same code is read correctly in Firefox. We were under the impression that JAWS is more compatible with IE and most screen reader users are comfortable using that browser. We were using IE 10 and IE 11 to test.

This leads me to a bigger question that we have been asking ourselves:

When we develop for accessibility, what criteria should be sufficient to say that our changes are accessible?

(1) Tests with JAWS and Windows Eyes in IE and Firefox both pass.

(2) Tests with JAWS and Windows Eyes in either IE or Firefox pass.

What are industry standards or practices on this? Please advice.

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,

Akshi Kakar,
Accessibility and Development
Hawkes Learning