Shifting Accessibility Left: What Do You Think?

[moorpheus (Tom M)]

I made a topic to discuss something similar at the end of last year but it didn’t seem to generate much interest.

Accessibility - unit testing approaches?

I know there’s plenty of tools out there to look at a fully available web page for accessibility issues, but what about for doing earlier unit testing? The application I’m testing involves Angular and the current unit tests are written using Jest in Typescript. I’ve tried out axe-core at the unit level but that is reporting back some false errors due to common page elements being stored elsewhere (e.g. where the language of the page is set). I think part of the problem is due to the Jest tests…

I agree that it should be shifted more left than it is now. At the moment, it’s either something done late on or is a nice-to-have (or is just plain not done!).

Unit tests to check for certain elements, e.g. alt-text, could help to catch some quick-win mistakes I think.

But going even further, it needs to be part of those initial discussions around a requirement. Three Amigos sessions for example could discuss it at that early stage - “what do we need to think about here for accessibility?” type things.