Signs it is time to revisit accessibility testing

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few signals that accessibility testing is due some attention.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues
• Keyboard-only testing finds problems in minutes

How we handle it

Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about accessibility testing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues — 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.