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Re: Making mobile view available to all as way of constraining a11y testing costs

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jan 5, 2018 1:09PM

That's exactly what we do on every project and it isn't particularly onerous at all. When I am pricing testing projects I usually reckon that a responsive design takes about 25% longer than a non-responsive one.

The whole point of investigating what changes at each breakpoint is to avoid having to repeat every test. Once you understand the code you can easily predict which success criteria are affected. Of course you have to be able to read and understand all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript in order to do that, but anyone who is doing accessibility testing should be able to.

The issue of automated tests is interesting. I don't find automated tools particularly useful so my experience of them is relatively limited, but I was surprised to find that SortSite gave exactly the same results on a recent project regardless of the viewport dimensions. For instance, it reported non-compliances that only occurred in the mobile layout even though the desktop layout was being displayed.

I had never thought about this before and I'm not sure if this is a serious fault or not. I also don't know if other tools do the same. One definite downside is that it reports duplicate IDs even if only one of the two elements is displayed at any time (the other being hidden with display:none).

Steve