Sprint 13: Your first experiences with accessibility testing

Write a blog post about

Your first experiences with accessibility testing. How you started, where your learning began and any assumptions you had to question, change or drop completely.

Sprint runs until June 7th.

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Shame my only experience of accessibility testing is installing WAVE plugin on my laptop and having a look about, with no professional work involving it :frowning:

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Apologies for potentially posting this in the wrong place!

As promised, here’s my post on my first experiences with accessibility testing.

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So I don’t think I have enough material to write a full blog post on this and I’m going to cheat a bit and write up my experiences here.

My first experiences with accessibility testing were pretty limited.

In university, I lived with someone who was visually impaired and used a screen reader while writing code. I was amazed that he could make out what it was saying as his mouse zoomed across things! This was probably my first introduction to any tool related to accessibility.

When I worked as a dev, my manager was really aware that the graphs our product produced were in no way colour blind friendly. To demonstrate the need for a change, we researched plug ins and similar tools that showed how these graphs displayed to someone with colour blindness. (If you’re programming in R, they actually have a package that can adjust images for you, very handy).

I began exploring accessibility guidelines more when I was researching user personas. I think the trouble for me was I couldn’t process the guidelines (wall of text) so pretty much needed someone to say “Do thing” or show me thing to do rather than figure it out from confusing (to me) guidelines.

I unfortunately never got to the stage on any of these projects where we considered accessibility as requirements and were given the time to test for various accessibility issues.

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Off the back of not having enough experience with Accessibility testing, maybe others in this thread would be interested in the next Power Hour

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I’m in a similar position, where I’ve never had the opportunity to formally do accessibility testing.

I first got interested in it seeing @rightsaidjames gives his talk at testBash Manchester 2017 - https://www.ministryoftesting.com/dojo/series/testbash-manchester-2017/lessons/accessibility-testing-crash-course-james-sheasby-thomas

From there I downloaded WAVE as a plugin for Chrome to have a play with it, knowing I won’t be using it at work (I don’t test UI). But otherwise not been able to do any accessibility testing.

I love the idea of doing it, it’s just the lack of means to apply it.

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Is it too late to write a comment or a blog post about this topic?

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Never too late, might write something myself. Thanks for bringing it to the top of the list of topics in the club.

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