WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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

for

From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Jan 11, 2018 6:47AM

I want to revisit an earlier part of the discussion.

If you do decide to test only one view of the site to limit testing costs, you should also clearly state to your users which view is the accessible one. Users should not have to switch back and forth between views of your site to figure out which one is accessible.

If you do decide to test multiple break points or view of the content, you should be able to keep the costs down by doing a few things and developing some experience with the process.

My suggestion would be to decide that one view or break point is going to be the version of the content you will test all the way through. Then you only test the significant differences in the other views.

In order to do this, you are going to need to walk-through the designs for the site or the site itself--or rely on someone who knows it well. Also, over time you will get a better idea of what differences are significant enough to test and which ones don't need to be tested.

Honestly, no one should be surprised that accessibility testing for a responsive site costs more. It costs more to test responsive sites in general. I think you could say that deciding to perform accessibility testing on only one view of the content would be like only performing testing with a desktop browser for a responsive site.

However, I am sure we all recognize that we don't always get the resources we want for accessibility testing so we have to do the best with what we are given. Robert is definitely doing his best to try to figure out how to conduct accessibility testing within the boundaries he is given--which really isn't any different from anything else having to do with software engineering.
I dislike the limitations we find ourselves dealing with, but I do admire how creative our community can be in trying to figure out how to get things done within those limitations.