Site accessibility: what screen readers, etc to test against, and how?

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+1 Q:

Site accessibility: what screen readers, etc to test against, and how?

The web site that we're writing needs to be "Accessible". The trouble is, while we understand the general conepts (semantic latout, alt text on images, light on Javascript, etc etc), we don't really have much knowledge of what screen reader products or other accessible browser are actually on the market and/or in general use, nor how to test against them.

So the questions are:

What products do we need to know about?
Would it be sensible (or even useful) to get hold of them to test against?
Are there any QA processes we should be looking at to assist us (we do a lot of automated browser testing [Selenium] to ensure we don't break anything for regular users; can we/should we do the same for screen readers?)

Thanks in advance for any tips.

+1 A:

See this question As the question implies if you want good screen reading testing you either need to hire someone to do the testing for you that has a lot of screen reader experience or invest the time in having developers and or QA learn a screen reader well. To my knolidge there is nothing like Selenium that can simulate how a screen reader handles a website. FOr general info on accessibility see http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/ This appears to have a lot of good information and covers all kinds of accessibility, not just blindness. For a list of tools to check html accessibility see http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete.html Although these tools will help they are not a substitute for screen reading testing. For a discussion of some of the problems with relying only on automated tools see http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/automated-tools.shtml

Jared 2010-09-14 14:05:46

Thanks for the link, but the answers to that question only cover the first part of my question. They cover the 'what', but not the 'how'.

Spudley 2010-09-14 14:19:28

Ah, thanks. That's much more useful :) Would still be interested to hear any voices of real-world experience.

Spudley 2010-09-14 15:07:25

Look at the second half of the answer in the linked question. Really, the only way you can be sure it's good is to walk it through.Selenium etc won't tell you that you're HTML makes any sense, it will just tell you it works syntactically (and to that end should still work for making sure all the functional bits work). HTML validators can tell you that your HTML is well formed etc, but can't tell you whether the content structure makes any sense. Validating this is unfortunately manual.

Jim Leonardo 2010-09-14 15:15:02

@Jim: Yes, validating is manual. I'm quite prepared that we'll have some inital hard work. Selenium equally doesn't tell us if we've made spelling errors, or that our work-flow makes sense. What it does do though, is tell us when we've broken something that was working before. That's what automated testing is for, and that is where I was hoping to get some tips.

Spudley 2010-09-14 15:29:39

+2 A:

In addition to Jared's answer: For the non screen reader visual accessibility testing, I've found that a simple and easily available test tool is a gray scale printer. This will let you know (roughly) if you have enough contrast for those who have a form of color blindness or other issues with contrast, etc and whether you've snuck any images in that are relying too much on color for information. It's not the be all and end all, but it's an easy first test.

Jim Leonardo 2010-09-14 15:22:08

Interesting idea. And nice and simple to do. Thanks.

Spudley 2010-09-14 15:24:31

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Site accessibility: what screen readers, etc to test against, and how?

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