“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” -Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
The above two-lines from the inventor himself convey the importance of Web Accessibility. In the Internet era, web has significant effect in everyone’s life. With each passing day, people use web for e-commerce, to shop, using social media, to check information. What not? It is not necessary that users who visit your website will always be able-bodied – with respect to vision, hearing, speech and locomotion. Visually impaired people need assistance from technology to read and understand the information. Hearing and Speech impaired people require captions, subtitles for the videos. Similarly, demand and requirement differs for every type of disability. An accessible website complies with all such requirements making the website accessible for every type of users irrespective of their disability.
Web Accessibility Testing is a part of Usability Testing performed to make certain that the website and its content are accessible and usable by people with different types of disabilities. In order to ensure that your organization’s website is completely accessible, automated or manual accessibility testing procedures must be followed.
Testing must be performed against the accessibility testing standards set by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) called as WCAG - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the latest version being WCAG 2.0 AA compliance.
The only way by which your organization can be sure that its website and the information shared are fully and truly accessible, is through Web Accessibility Testing. The first and foremost point is to cater to the community of people with disabilities. Assisted by the technology and the guidelines, developer and designer team can work on the content and the appearance of the website to make it 100% accessible. Secondly, government agencies have now made it a norm to make all the websites completely accessible. In such case, it becomes inevitable for the companies that deal with government agencies.
People with special needs make use of special assistive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, speech recognition software, and special keyboard to work and communicate. Your website must be in a position to support and accommodate all these technologies.
Vindhya’s Testing Team records all the observations in a report format that has detailed explanation. Report has a dashboard, for quick view, that says the following:
These are the value added solutions that Vindhya’s Web Accessibility Testing team offers to our customers to ensure their website to be truly accessible in every way.
When accessibility testing is done, a wide range of disabilities are considered. Website and its content should not discriminate the users and also, multiple disabilities. Types of disabilities supported by accessibility testing are:
Appropriate and thorough web accessibility testing ensures ALL the users of your website are getting a quality experience while accessing it. To achieve that, outsource web accessibility testing to Vindhya.
