Accessibility testing

Spend most of the class testing your website using different accessibility tools—and fixing any problems that arise.

Goal

Make your website work well for all users—and remember it doesn’t need to work exactly the same for every human being.

Refer to the accessibility testing checklist ➔

  1. Collaboration

    This is collaborative. You personally won’t be doing all the accessibility testing. We’ll each test other people’s websites to remove any pre-conceived notions about how the site should work.

1 Enable Issues on your repo

Before we start anything, everybody needs to go to their own repository on GitHub.com and enable their Issues tab.

Video on enabling Issues on GitHub repos ➔

2 Determine the accessibility scenarios

Referring to the accessibility testing checklist, we’ll figure out which tools and tests need to be run.

Different people will be assigned different accessibility testing tools to cover as much as possible.

3 Write down the URL to your website

Using a Gist at the front of class, we’ll write down all our URLs so that everybody has access to your website URL for testing.

The URL to this Gist will be displayed on the board so you can get a copy of the list of websites to test.

If you fork the Gist you’ll be able to check off each person as you go.

  1. Notice

    You need to know—and add—your own URL. If your name isn’t on that list you won’t get the marks.

4 Test everybody’s website

With everybody working together your website will be accessibility tested in lots of different situations.

You’ll be assigned a specific accessibility test—it will be your job to test everybody’s website using the tool you’re assigned.

Some tools are a lot of work to test. In those cases the same tool will be distributed to multiple students and the class list will be broken into smaller chunks.

5 Submitting Issues

If you find problems with the website you’re testing, create an Issue on GitHub in their repository.

Tutorials on using GitHub Issues ➔

Website URL to repo conversion

  1. Cut the username
  2. Remove the starting dot
  3. Change io to com
  4. Paste the username before the repository name

Create a detailed issue

The issue you create for another person’s website should be detailed with at least this information:

  1. An informative title
  2. A screenshot of the problem—if that makes sense
  3. Details and informative description of the problem
  4. Any solutions you can think of to help solve the problem

If there already is an Issue for the problem you’re seeing, make a comment on the issue with any extra information you may know.

6 Fix problems

If there are any problems with your website in a specific tool—fix them!

It’s up to you to make your website work well in all tested situations—we’re developing our websites to empower all humans in the world.

  1. Reminder

    Remember that your website doesn’t have to function exactly the same in every situation—just that it should be functional in every situation.