Accessibility Testing—Are you leaving customers behind?

In today’s Insights, we’re focusing on Accessibility Testing:

Were you aware of the recent Global Accessibility Awareness Day?

This topic is very personal to me. I have an eye problem that has, more often than you might expect, made it difficult for me to interact with technology. Take a moment and consider…

Consumers are relying on digital platforms for online purchases, customer service, and bill pay more than ever. In some cases, these are the only options available to the customer.

Are you sure your customer-facing applications are accessible to all customers?

Given that 15% of the world’s population have disabilities, ensuring digital accessibility is crucial to reaching the widest customer base possible.

What are the key components of a mature accessibility testing program?

1. Awareness and adoption in the enterprise architecture

Ensure that you’re familiar with the WW3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards for web accessibility. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

The standards cover topics to ensure that you provide:

·       Perceivable content

·       Operability to a wide variety of abilities

·       Understandable content and design

·       Robust experience across adaptive technologies

2. Ensure that accessibility testing is embedded in the test cases used during your sprints from project initiation

If you haven’t already appointed someone to lead the accessibility program in your organization, this would be a great time to do that. The accessibility of all your customer-facing and internal applications, for all user abilities, is a nice and smart thing to offer. It’s not unrealistic to think that this will be a regulatory mandate in the near future. Getting ahead of this effort will save you a lot of hard conversations later.

3. Creating a governance, monitoring, and reporting framework for accessibility

Accessibility can be impacted by small changes in applications; therefore, it’s imperative that an ongoing governance, monitoring, and reporting plan is established and an accessibility dashboard is developed for easy communication to leadership.

4. Maximizing accessibility and SEO overlap

Surprisingly these two elements of design overlap in many ways including website and page structures, formatting, linking, and managing images, video, and non-text items. You can go to ARIA for a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications more accessible to people with disabilities.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about a variety of testing strategies and services you can visit CTG’s testing page at https://www.ctg.com/solutions/testing-solutions/