Testing

Testing your Website

Testing your website as the design develops ensures that any potential problems are highlighted at an early stage in the developmental process. Redeveloping a website once it is finished can be expensive and time consuming. We recommend that you test your website throughout the development life cycle, and also regularly upon completion to ensure that standards are maintained.

There are a variety of ways you can check to see if your site is accessible.

Simple Checks

Several accessibility issues are easy to spot. As a starting point for testing that your website is accessible, carry out the following steps:

  • Resize your browser, try out a variety of sizes
  • Navigate your website using only the keyboard
  • Use a different browser to access your website
  • Print a few pages in black and white

These simple steps may highlight problems such as inaccessible menus and links, insufficient colour contrast, and designs that don't display correctly with different screen resolutions and operating systems.

Automated checking

A number of automated tools exist. Some are free, and others need to be purchased.

Generally the free automated tools check only one page at a time, and tools which you pay for can assess entire sites. Automated accessibility checkers are a useful starting point when testing for accessibility, as they can quickly highlight code that has not been properly written and find major several major flaws.

There is a limit to what automated checkers can test for, and manual analysis of websites is also required. Automated checkers can check for approximately 30% of all accessibility issues. For instance an automated checker can determine if alternative text to describe images has been provided or not, but it cannot make the judgment as to whether the alternative text is an appropriate description of the image. You read more in the article 'The Problem with Automated Accessibility Testing Tools'.

Free Testing Tools

It is also useful to ensure that Web Standards are adhered to by testing the website code.

Testing Tools you can Purchase

The following pages from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative website are useful:

Manual Testing Assisted by Toolbars

After you have run your website through an automated checker, there are a number of manual checks that you need to perform for each of the Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines checkpoints. There is a detailed list of Techniques for checking conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

There are a number of toolbars and tools that can be used to make this testing and checking process quicker. They can also be used to assist in automated checking as they perform functions such as submitting pages to external services and validating code.

Toolbars

There is no formal certification for accessible websites, however several of the firms listed above provide their own 'button'; which you can display on your website to indicate conformance. The W3 Web Content Initiative WAI logo for certification offers the most widely used conformance buttons.

User Testing

Representative users of your target audience users should be used. You should involve disabled potential users of the site from the beginning of the development process, consulting them about the design, and having them formally test the site under realistic conditions using assistive technology. You may already have a process of testing the site with potential users that can be expanded to include disabled users. If you are unfamiliar with working with users, you should get expert advice. You can find out more about how to effectively involve a diverse group of users in testing and evaluation is this article about Involving Users from the WWW Consortium.

Expert Evaluation

There are numerous companies which provide expert guidance on accessibility issues, as well as website accessibility testing and evaluation. See our contact page for details of how to get in touch with Professor Helen Petrie from the University of York.