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Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures

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From: Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
Date: Jun 22, 2020 9:05AM

Hi all.

First I want to acknowledge and thank you all for the extremely helpful discussions and information you are providing in this group.

I'd like to get your thoughts on the test procedures for the WCAG success criteria. Going through WCAG, I find that most success criteria have multiple sufficient techniques and failures, each one having its own test procedures.

Example:
* Sufficient Technique for SC 1.3.1 > Situation A > ARIA11 > Test
procedure: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/aria/ARIA11.html#tests
* Failure for SC 1.3.1 > F2 > Test procedure https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F2.html#tests

I see how this can result to a very comprehensive accessibility test, however, my gut feel is that it would take a very long time to test a page if we go through each test procedure.

Please can you share your thoughts - is there another way of looking at it? I'm open to other perspectives. Also, your techniques in using the test procedures would be very useful.

Thank you for reading my message and I look forward to hearing from you.

Julius

Hi Julius,

Good testing does take time. Our initial analysis make take several hours per page for the first few pages of a new application or website. Fortunately in most cases the implementation of site features will be consistent and when feedback on the first few pages is provided to the developers then any needed changes can be rolled through the project.

We have a set of techniques for testing most common web application features available in our testing template. The tests are based upon the WCAG SCs, HTML 5 and ARIA specs and the ARIA guidelines from the W3C. We have organized the tests by what something is. For example, a text field, a button or an accordion type control. I hope that you find these helpful. We update the template regularly based upon feedback from our in-house and contracted development staff and q/a testers as well as members of our accessibility team. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have questions or would like to offer suggestions for improvement.

Here is the direct URL < https://accessibility.hhs.texas.gov/docs/HHSAccessibilityReportingTemplate.dotx> The page where it lives is: < https://accessibility.hhs.texas.gov/testing.htm>

Please consider this template open source and free for use, modification or distribution.

Michael Moore
EIR Accessibility Manager
<EMAIL REMOVED>