Automated Accessibility Testing

Over the past few years, the rise of ADA based lawsuits for websites has continued to make headlines with Winn Dixie, Hobby Lobby, Five Guys, and Block getting hit in 2017. This talk will show how accessibility testing can be automated so as not to increase the time needed to deliver new features.

508 compliance and WCAG 2.0 have been around for decades in an attempt to make sure websites are accessible to all people, regardless of disability. While these guidelines have been around for quite some time, over the past few years we’ve seen an increase in high profile lawsuits for websites that are not accessible. In 2017, Winn Dixie lost a court case over the accessibility of their website as the court determined the $250,000 cost (according to Winn Dixie) to make the website accessible was not an undue burden. In today’s age, all websites should strive to be compliant with accessibility guidelines in order to ensure they are available to ALL potential website visitors.

While making a website compliant with 508 guidelines and WCAG 2.0 is not necessarily a large development effort, it can be a large effort to test each page to ensure compliance. This lengthy testing time can slow down delivery of features/functionality as it gets reviewed for compliance and as it is iterated on by developers. Wouldn’t it be better if developers and testers could have an objective report that checks for common accessibility requirements rather than having to manually check each page every time a change is made?

We’ll look at multiple tools produced by Google, WebAIM, Deque, and others that can be used to automatically generate a report on a site’s accessibility. After reviewing the available tools, we’ll look at ways they can be integrated into a development process so they are automatically run every time a change is made in order to save the time of testers. Attendees will leave with actual examples they can leverage on their own for semi-automated testing themselves as well as code examples that can be shared with development teams to even further automate the processing of ensuring an accessible web for all individuals.

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