How do I test for accessibility? In short, there are two ways to test the website’s user accessibility: human evaluation or digital evaluation tools. But the most successful approach is to use a combination of both. That’s because no single tool – no matter how expensive it is – can judge every component that affects accessibility.
Here are the top 5 tests for HTML accessibility:
- Keyboard Testing – Try to use your website with the keyboard (hide your mouse). Can you access everything with the keyboard?
- Focus Indicators – As you tab through the elements on the page, can you see where you are? Keyboard-only users need to see where they are on the page to effectively navigate the page.
- Code Validation – Does the code validate against the W3C HTML specifications?
- Images – Do all images have appropriate alternative text? Some users may not see the images and will need to access the alternative version to understand the web page content. The alternative version of the image is defined using the alt attribute on the img element. If an image does not convey any information, the image can have an empty alt attribute (alt=””).
- Semantic Elements – Are HTML tags used appropriately? This includes headings, lists, quotes and definitions.