Pa11y
Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#52A lot of good suggestions here already, but in terms of screenreaders, JAWS has a majority stake in the market. They make a tool call JAWS Inspect which gives you reports (and by extension, version control) over your screenreader presentation. It's not free though.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
JAWS + IE is the most popular combination [1] [1] https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#browsercomb...
> JAWS + IE is the most popular combination It's worth keeping a few points in mind when reading these results: 1. The survey was carried out in October 2017. Things can and do move quite rapidly in this area, especially given the increased number of users who will be running Windows 10 now who may not have been back then. 2. IE won't be around forever, and once the accessibility of Microsoft Edge improves (which is…
My only comments to that would be WebAim is the highest authority on accessibility.
I'm well aware that these combinations will change over time.
The biggest thing is that JAWS costs a lot of money, so people buy, get used to it, and stick with their setup.
I tend to say, 'The only people who still use IE have no choice" or something like that.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#54Pay me to do it... But in all seriousness, I use aXe-Coconut[1], headingsMaper[2]. Then tab through the page and make sure you can get from top left to bottom right. The cursor[focus state /ouline] should be visible the whole time and you should never lose your place. When you are done that, if you have a Mac turn on voiceover with Command+F5 and use Safari or Chrome (more aria-support). On Windows, download NVDA[3]…
what are your rates and why are you qualified?
I don't want the extra work. But I do accessibility as my full-time job.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I mean vision impaired. There are all kinds of different vision disabilities besides blindness and color blindness.
Yes, exactly. And many such impairments will not prevent you benefitting from layout, colors, typography, images, and sundry other kinds of graphical trickery.
Sounds like you are confusing non-blindness for normal functionality. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a page for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_impairment
The idea of accessibility is that a product/service is available to a wide audience regardless of their physical/cognitive impairment. It is still discriminatory if some user might be capable of enjoying visual eye candy if they must struggle to do so due to an impairment and are denied access to that content otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#56Pay me to do it... But in all seriousness, I use aXe-Coconut[1], headingsMaper[2]. Then tab through the page and make sure you can get from top left to bottom right. The cursor[focus state /ouline] should be visible the whole time and you should never lose your place. When you are done that, if you have a Mac turn on voiceover with Command+F5 and use Safari or Chrome (more aria-support). On Windows, download NVDA[3]…
I would add, to really test, after turning on voice over, turn off your monitor. This will let you test if you can explore your website with the visual structure.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#571. Install NVDA
2. Read part 4 from user guide
https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide....
3. turn off your monitors
4. try to do simple smock test
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems a bit bananas to me because there’s plenty of valid HTML5 is NOT valid XHTML or XML. For example, HTML5 allows common tags such as and to be unclosed, which is not valid in XHTML. HTML5 written in this style is not “wrong” - it’s valid, and correctly presented by tools like VoiceOver. Screen readers will be a-okay with HTML5; this advice is going to send people down wild goose chases with no need. XHTML is…
In modern browsers all modern HTML5 is valid XHTML so long as it conforms to the syntax and tag structure. In fact the only real difference, aside from closing tags like br and img , is that with XHTML the browser yells at you when you get HTML wrong. On my personal sites I send all my HTML with a .xhtml file extension to force XML compliance, but the code is modern HTML5.
that is wrong. this is valid html5 for example:
content
content2
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#59Not seen anyone mention it yet, but the Accessibility feature in Firefox (might only be available in Nightly/developer edition, not sure) built into the developer tools are pretty good. You need to go into the dev tools settings to enable it from memory. It gives you access to what is essentially an "accessibility DOM" that shows you how the page's structure will look to a screen reader, and you can also check the co…
Just checked in Firefox dev tools: there's a top-level menu for Accessibility, but the panel displays a grayed-out message, "Turn On Accessibility Features" which can't be clicked.
Thanks for pointing out this (future) feature, it sounds very useful. I'll keep an eye out for when it's available.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website?
#60Not seen anyone mention it yet, but the Accessibility feature in Firefox (might only be available in Nightly/developer edition, not sure) built into the developer tools are pretty good. You need to go into the dev tools settings to enable it from memory. It gives you access to what is essentially an "accessibility DOM" that shows you how the page's structure will look to a screen reader, and you can also check the co…
Just checked in Firefox dev tools: there's a top-level menu for Accessibility, but the panel displays a grayed-out message, "Turn On Accessibility Features" which can't be clicked. Thanks for pointing out this (future) feature, it sounds very useful. I'll keep an eye out for when it's available.
Just had a quick read, looks like it's available since Firefox v63, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Accessibility...
It should work though once you click on that button, weird that it doesn't seem to be working for you.
Edit: Just read through more of that link, it's got quite a good breakdown of the features on it.