Where's the Best Place to Start with Accessibility Testing (and Certifications)?

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Hi everyone! :waving_hand:

I’m interested in diving deeper into Accessibility Testing and would love to hear your thoughts on the best way to get started!

  • What resources did you find most helpful when you were starting out? ( Open to any courses, blogs, podcasts etc.)
  • Are there specific certifications you’ve done as a beginner which you’ve found to be particularly beneficial?
  • Any tools or communities you’d recommend for hands-on practice?

Looking forward to hearing your insights and/or experiences!

Thanks so much,
Nicola :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi @nicola_qa,

Three things that I would like to share with you:

  1. Explore accessibility | Ministry of Testing - This is an amazing collection of resources on Accessibility Testing on the MoT platform. Explore them.
  2. a11y-evaluation-tools - Google Sheets - This is a curated collection of accessibility testing tools.
  3. Connect with @AdyStokes and @jane_d_cruze . they are the experts on this topic and have extensive experience in this topic.

All the best!

Let me know if I can help with anything else.

Rahul

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Thanks for tagging @parwalrahul. I guess it depends and where you want to start @phoenix_fenegan?
If you want an overview of what it is and getting started @deborahreid’s Introduction course would be a great place to start.
If you want to jump into accessiblity testing my article and Masterclass called Simple tests for accessibility (every tester should know) are both available on MoT by searching for ‘simple accessibility’.
I’d recommend following the 30 days of accessibility challenge as a good way to pick up things in a structured learning journey too.
Finally, overlays are really bad and don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. See https://shouldiuseanaccessibilityoverlay.com/
Good luck on your learning journey and if you have any specific questions please tag me and I’ll do my best to try to help.

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Brilliant - Thanks for the suggestions Rahul! Very helpful :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you @AdyStokes I’ll definitely be spending some time looking into this! :heart:

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I recommend Deque University, which one of my team has done. I have also heard good things about Sara Soueidan’s Practical Accessibility course. I haven’t seen it, but I have seen a lot of stuff she has posted on LinkedIn.

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) have a couple of good courses, but they are intended for people who are already working in accessibility.

I only employ people with 10+ years’ experience, for whom certifications aren’t important, but if I was going to hire someone less experienced I would give much more weight to the IAAP courses than any others.

I recommend that you join the WebAIM email discussion forum and maybe the W3C WAI forum, where you will find a lot of the most experienced testers discussing all sorts of topics. You can just lurk and listen, but WebAIM in particular is very helpful towards beginners.

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Great options were already mentioned. So I’ll just add some ideas for getting into the accessibility community and staying up to date after the initial trainings. I concur with Steve that lurking and listening in communities is really helpful. Don’t limit yourself to pure accessibility testing spaces.

  • Meetups
    Find a local meetup near you or online to learn and connect with other people interested in the topic.
    A11yTalks is a monthly online meetup
  • Communities
    I find the Accessibility Slack group very useful and active. As they had to remove the public invite link, DM me if you’re interested.
  • Conferences
    I love axe-con. It’s a free online conference. Usually there are sessions about testing in the Developer track.
  • Podcasts
    I only listen to German podcasts on accessibility. Maybe someone knows a good English one.
  • Newletters
    Accessibility Blog, Newsletter - Funka Foundation - there might be better ones out there
  • Blogs
    I like Adrian Roselli’s blog. Lots of deep dives into interesting questions like comparing automated accessibility scanner tools.
  • People with disabilities
    What better way to learn about issues users are having than hearing directly from them. User testing would be great, but not always possible. I follow several different people on YouTube and LinkedIn who talk openly about how they use technology and barriers they experience, for example Molly Burke. Your environment probably includes some people with disabilities as well, maybe an elderly relative. My dad is now my prime example for the need of larger buttons and high contrast.
    It can be helpful for testing and justifying bug impact to be able to connect issues with people.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is just around the corner and there are many accessibility events all over the world. Deque is doing a free Accessibility Fundamentals Bootcamp training. Here are all registered events: Events - GAAD

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A couple of years ago I completed a course “WAIO.1x: Introduction to Web Accessibility (W3Cx). It is a free online course (optional paid exam if you want to take it) and takes about 20 hours to complete. It covers the basics for those with no experience in accessibility with IT. www.edx.org provide the course.

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