Manual vs Automated Accessibility Testing

Getting the human experience

Automated tools are great for identifying a broad range of accessibility issues, but they cannot provide an emotional understanding of the user experience for people with disabilities. Certain accessibility issues may cause more problems for people than others, and sometimes an accessibility checker alone won’t be able to provide a detailed overview of issues in the same way human experts can.

Accessibility specialists are able to pinpoint issues which create user experience issues on an emotional level and suggest solutions for your team to amend them straightaway, leading to a positive and professional outcome for people with disabilities. This not only improves the user experience of your digital product, but boosts brand reputation and recognition as well.

Manual Accessibility Testing

Manual testing is one of the safest methods to determine the accessibility of a web page. The accuracy of the results solely depends on the knowledge of the tester. The process involves a thorough understanding of the client side code. This code can be viewed in most web browsers. The tester checks the page structure, and reviews the code where it is necessary. Manual testing allows finding accessibility problems which cannot be found programmatically. For example, a testing tool can determine if an image has descriptive text associated to it, but during manual testing it is possible to determine if the description provides enough information about the image. Manual testing requires a precise systematic overview especially in case of larger sites making sure that all pages and elements are covered.

Automated Accessibility Testing

Automatic testing can provide an initial assessment much faster, and give a good idea of the accessibility of the site on a larger scale. Also, as long as all pages of the site are connected, the tester does not have to worry about missing any pages. While it is a good idea to double check the findings of the automated testing results, when certain problems reoccur several times, once the validity of the problem is established, the tester can file each occurrence much faster. There are, however, certain issues which automated testing cannot detect. This depends on the standards or guidelines we are testing for. For example, when we are testing for a specific syntax, such as valid HTML, color contrast, or the existence of programmatic table headers, automatic testing tools can provide us with 100 percent accurate results. When we are trying to determine if some information is indicated by the use of color only, an automated tool cannot determine it with a good certainty.

Safest Method

Automated testing should always be complemented with manual testing. While we can save a significant amount of time with an automated testing tool, we need to double check the results and rule out other issues. Also, while a testing tool can check for most standards, it is only a human who can tell if the site is easy to use and navigate for a person who is using any assistive technology.