E-mail List Archives

You are here: Home > Community > E-mail List Archives > View Thread

Thread: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures

Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)

From: Julius Charles Serrano
Date: Sun, Jun 21 2020 1:46PM
Subject: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures
No previous message | Next message →

From: Steve Green
Date: Sun, Jun 21 2020 5:25PM
Subject: Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures
← Previous message | Next message →

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

From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Mon, Jun 22 2020 8:28AM
Subject: Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures
← Previous message | Next message →

We've found that accessibility insights is a wonderful shortcut for getting at a pretty baseline "this page is okay": https://accessibilityinsights.io/

It probably doesn't cover every single SC, but for us, at least, its combination of automated tests and very in-depth "guided" manual tests is extremely helpful. It's still a huge endeavor to test a site, but this at least gives us a consistent way to test and discuss each page we are analyzing.

From: Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
Date: Mon, Jun 22 2020 9:05AM
Subject: Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures
← Previous message | Next message →

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 ADDRESS REMOVED =

From: Dhananjay Bhole
Date: Mon, Jun 22 2020 11:14AM
Subject: Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures
← Previous message | Next message →

Hi,

We need not follow all the sufficient techniques for testing SC. They
are context based. The tester has to understand scenario and choose
specific technique that suit it.

If you have registered account, You can refer Deque university Web
accessibility carriculam 2.0 WCAG section in which specific scenario
of particular SC is explained.

Regards

On 6/22/20, Jeremy Echols < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> We've found that accessibility insights is a wonderful shortcut for getting
> at a pretty baseline "this page is okay": https://accessibilityinsights.io/
>
> It probably doesn't cover every single SC, but for us, at least, its
> combination of automated tests and very in-depth "guided" manual tests is
> extremely helpful. It's still a huge endeavor to test a site, but this at
> least gives us a consistent way to test and discuss each page we are
> analyzing.
>
>

From: Julius Charles Serrano
Date: Tue, Jun 23 2020 2:00PM
Subject: Re: your thoughts on the WCAG test procedures
← Previous message | No next message

Hello everyone.

Thank you so much for your very helpful responses about the test
procedures and specific methodologies you use.

This is already helping us get clarity on how we need to test web
content moving forward.

Also, thanks for sharing your thoughts (resources, testing techniques,
book recommendation) on my question regarding testing for native apps -
very useful as well.

Cheers everyone!