What Is Digital Accessibility Testing?

 What is Digital accessibility testing? 

It is a testing method wherein audits and tests are conducted to check a digital service or a website for any usability issues and also for accessibility conformance. Tests are undertaken using a range of manual checks and a combination of automated software. In certain scenarios, there are external experts involved in performing accessibility testing at scale.  

 

Digital accessibility standards: 

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) are important accessibility guidelines that contain specifications for leveraging digital accessibility standards. Hence, the importance of accessibility testing plays a key role in ensuring that the organization achieves both short and long-term goals. 

 

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG):  

It provides a single shared standard for web accessibility that meets the needs of organizations, individuals, and governments internationally. Perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust are the four principles of WCAG. 

There are accessibility testing success criteria for each guideline and A, AA, and AAA are the three incremental levels. The criterion is cumulative, which means if an organization conforms to Level AA, then it must also conform to Level A and if the organization conforms to Level AAA, then it must also conform to Level A and AA. 

 

The importance of digital accessibility compliance and conformance: 

There is a significant distinction between conformance and compliance. A lack of compliance means that an organization may need to face legal consequences. When digital accessibility standards are not conformed with then it means that an organization lacks non-legally binding guidelines. 

Conformance paves for a more direct way wherein an organization is said to either conform or not conform with certain accessibility standards and guidelines. The number of WCAG checkpoints that have been passed or failed by the organization needs to be projected by the accessibility review and also the low/medium/high/critical issues that have been detected. 

The improvement can be measured by organizations by the number of bugs that have been found during accessibility testing.