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Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 21, 2020 5:25PM

The techniques and failures described in WCAG are just some examples, and we don't really make much use of them when conducting a WCAG audit. Instead, we look at how to test the normative WCAG success criteria in the context of the way the website is coded. In a few cases, there is only one way to test a particular success criterion. In other cases, there might be a great many, only some of which will be relevant depending on how the website is coded.

You won't find many of these testing techniques documented anywhere. To some extent this is because companies like us spend thousands of hours developing these techniques and it's our intellectual property. We're not about to just give it away free to anyone.

In any case, testing is not a matter of mechanically working through a checklist of prescriptive tests. Modern coding techniques are so complex and in the vast majority of cases the code we are testing is so terrible that it requires a great deal of skill to accurately test a website. If you tried to write down all the testing techniques we use, it would be a very, very thick book. However, on any given page, it is only necessary to apply a small proportion of those techniques.

If your aim is to audit a website for WCAG conformance, then I don't really see that there is any other way to do it. If your aim is to do an accessibility audit, then you can define that to mean anything you want and you can do whatever testing you want.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd