Did you know that the European Accessibility Act mandates that websites, software, electronic devices and mobile apps must be accessible to people with disabilities, elderly people or people with low tech-affinity, be it private or public sector, starting from the 28th of June 2025?
Still, accessibility is typically seen as a "nice to have" requirement. From our experiences, accessibility testing is often excluded in the SLDC because of other priorities. Let us tell you: Accessibility is not negotiable! As a tester it is our obligation to act ethically - in the end we are validating the requirements and protecting the end user. As diversity, equity, and inclusion are increasingly considered in testing, we must ensure that the end user, especially those with disabilities, is not impacted or excluded due to the lack of accessibility.
But, how accessible is my website or application? And how accessible is my website when comparing to other websites? These important questions are surprisingly difficult to answer. Testing the accessibility with automated tools does not always align with end user impact. And how do you even score a website and based on which data?
In this session we will present our journey in answering these questions and how we achieved our personal goal, creating a scoring mechanism for web accessibility. Moreover we will provide a simple blueprint for everyone to enhance their automated testing with little manual validation efforts, based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We will show you some results from our research analyzing the websites of 30 large European companies and from the John Hopkins University on Vaccine Websites and NIH-funded universities in the US.
To generate your own scoring framework, all you need is an automated accessibility testing tool of your choice, a big data pool with accessibility data, and a simple manual test script.
Key takeaways:- Accessibility is not negotiable - it affects everyone!
- Minimal manual testing can inform regarding the end-user impact of automation results
- Let's openly share our knowledge and experience around accessibility - in the end everyone gains from that
