Key Takeaways from the Simple Tests for Accessibility Webinar

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Here are my key takeaways from Ady Stokes webinar on [Ministry of Testing, you can also check out his article Simple Tests For Accessibility Every Tester Should Know.

These are used for sites with main menus on the top or side.

This helps people save time and not have to tab (unnecessarily) heaps, to get to what they want to get to.

A great example of this is University of Illinois’ College of Applied Health Sciences site.

Keyboard navigation

You should be able to do everything you want to do, only with a keyboard.

A part of this is visual focus, you should be able to clearly see where you are in the page.

Alt-text

To check if your image has alt-text in your browser, right click on the image and Inspect (then look at the Elements tab). Once here, you are looking for “alt=“.

Every image does not need alt text. But keep in mind that images’ alt-text will be read by screen readers.

Since some images are decorative, you may opt to consciously skip alt-text for certain images and leave it blank.

This will however, for automated accessibility checks, raise a lot of red flags - that you’ll then need to address.

A great tool to get started with accessibility testing: WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation tool

Colour deficiency

The most common colour deficiency is having problems with red and green.

So for displaying errors, you shouldn’t rely on colours alone, instead use another aid e.g. an icon and/or text.

Offer choice

It’s not a one size fits all, but it helps to offer people choices as to how they will access information.

Note that helping one group of people, may end up hindering another.

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