How do you test a Power Apps site for accessibility?

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I’ve moved this over from the chat. Hopefully someone can point @prunejuicechilled in a helpful direction.

Originally sent in question Quick Question
prunejuicechilled

Hi! Can anyone recommend reliable resources regarding testing solutions created with Power Apps? I'm specifically referring to accessibility, as a dev doesn't have 100% flexibility when a site is created using Power Apps. This can make testing for accessibility challenging, as we may need some adjustments or additional understanding to what expected results can be in these situations.

prunejuicechilled

Not yet! The other testers I have spoken to didn't have specific knowledge about this. They said any font end page should be testable for WCAG guidelines, even if created by Power Apps. I'm not finding that to be the case, exactly, but I don't know enough to understand and document what I have worked out so far.

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Don’t bother, seriously. I have tested several Power Apps, and you certainly can test all the WCAG success criteria. However, not only is the accessibility disastrously bad, but almost none of the issues can be fixed because the development environment is so tightly constrained. Save your employer’s time and your sanity, and work on something else where you can make a difference. If anyone challenges you, tell them to call me and I will explain.

It’s a drag-and-drop authoring environment and you can’t change or directly control the HTML it creates. You can’t even apply custom CSS or JavaScript files, which is what I have used to fix issues with other drag-and-drop authoring tools.

The HTML created by Power Apps is utterly disgusting and unreadable. I did some tests and found that it uses 80 times as much code as is actually necessary. Even if you want to look at a trivial piece of code like a heading element, you can’t see all of it in the DOM Inspector. It should just be one line of code, but it’s about 80 lines and about 20 levels deep of nested garbage. For example, a simple text label in Power Apps occupied 3,400 bytes compared with the 41 bytes in the equivalent code that I hand wrote.

The practical consequence of this is that it’s virtually impossible to look at the relationship between two elements because you can’t look at the code for both at the same time – you can only look at a tiny part of the code for one of them.

I have written a lengthy list of generic issues for my team and clients, but it’s far too long to publish here. Power Apps violate pretty much every WCAG success criterion and you can’t fix any of them.

Then there’s the time allowance. I reckon it takes 1.5 to 2 times as long to test a Power App compared with the same application if it was coded properly. I use a factor of at least 2 when quoting for jobs, partially because it takes longer and partially because I want to lose the work to some other poor sucker. I usually want to win everything we quote for, but I am very happy to lose Power Apps testing quotes.

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Thank you for this! I’ll pass this on for future projects.

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I really am curious, what is a “power app”, sounds super generic and afraid to even do a google.

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I believe it’s Microsoft Power Apps, but who am I to make assumptions! :smiley:

It’s … of course … AI powered, you draw a sketch and it will build a website for you from that sketch. Something like that.

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I did suspect it was the MS flavour, these are portable apps that run, as far I know also run in their mobile client as well, so there is bound to be a layer of complexity when it comes to layout compacting/re-flowing. Joy.
What tools does one get for this kind of testing, does it provide any traces or analyics?And do you have to roll your own integrations?

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Yes, it’s an MS product :slight_smile:

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It’s a drag-and-drop builder for people who want to build terrible applications very fast. It’s just like Wix or SquareSpace, but for web applications, not brochureware.

You have no access to any of the code, so you would be limited to the integrations MS provide, if any. There are no testing tools, and frankly it’s not worth testing because it’s worse than garbage and you can’t fix any issues you find.

You honestly wouldn’t believe how disgusting the code it that it generates - see my previous post. If you get the chance to look at an existing Power App it’s worth doing, just out of morbid interest. But don’t EVER think about using it - it’s pure filth.