In this journal entry, Jeremy Keith argues that when it comes to accessibility testing it’s not just about finding issues—it’s about finding the issues at the right time.
Here’s my summary:
- Accessibility Audits performed by experts and real Assistive Technology users are good!
- But try to get the most out of them by having them focus on the things that you can’t easily do yourself.
- We ourselves can handle things like colour contrast. It can be checked at the design stage before a line of code is written.
- Likewise HTML structure such as ensuring accessible form labels, ensuring images have useful
altvalues, using landmarks likemainandnav, heading structure etc. These are not tricky to find and fix ourselves and they have a big accessibility impact. - As well as fixing those issues ourselves we should also put in place new processes, checks and automation if possible to stop them recurring
- As for custom interactive elements (tabs, carousels, navigation, dropdowns): these are specific to our site and complicated/error-prone by nature, so those are the things we should be aiming to have professional Accessibility Audits focus on in order to get best value for money.