Testing for accessibility

Accessible Turas products

When creating new Turas products and features, accessibility must be considered at all stages of design and development.

Accessibility is about making sure your product is usable by as many people as possible. It is important that people are not excluded from using our products on the basis of experiencing a disability. Everyone on the team is responsible for making our products accessible.

The accessibility of a new product or feature should be considered early. All Turas developers and testers must be aware that Turas products have to comply with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.

The Turas Design System has been designed to be accessible to these standards. However, the implementation of these styles within individual products can have an impact on compliance. Therefore, it is important that accessibility testing is carried out within the context of the product.

How to test for accessibility

Accessibility testing is carried out in two ways:

Automated
Manual

NES uses both methods to ensure our products and services meet level AA of WCAG 2.2. If Turas products do not comply with this standard, then we could be breaking the law.

Automated Testing

We use a variety of tools for automated testing, including:

Automated accessibility testing tools are a great resource, but they don’t automatically make your products accessible. Manual testing should be carried out after using automated tools.

Manual Testing

Many accessibility issues can’t be replicated using automated tools. Most of WCAG 2.2 success criteria requires human judgement.

Here are a few examples of how you can manually test for accessibility:

make sure your content works on all of the main browsers Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari
make sure content is responsive and works on mobile devices
unplug the mouse and interact with the product using only a keyboard
turn off speakers and microphones to make sure the experience is the same with or without sound
interact with your product using a screen reader such as JAWS, VoiceOver, NVDA or ChromeVox
read links out loud to ensure they are meaningful and accurately describe the link’s purpose
increase the font size to 200% and check that the text reflow is readable and all text is still visible
turn off CSS and see if important content disappears or if content is still displayed in an order that is easy to understand
if you’re using Windows, turn on high contrast mode to understand how users with low vision may view the product
turn off images and check that the content still makes sense
click on form field labels, check if the cursor focus is on the related input
using screen readers on pages to see if you can still navigate and elements make sense