Accessibility testing: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about accessibility testing that come up most often on our calls.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Do we need to care about this?

Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How do we know it is working?

Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about accessibility testing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Keyboard-only testing finds problems in minutes — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.