Accessibility Testing

[tdonohue]

This ticket is a placeholder for performing accessibility testing of our prototype, and gathering tools/ideas for doing such testing.

As mentioned in today's meeting, I found an "Accessibility Developer Tools" Chrome plugin that does an accessibility audit and reports back issues as severe, warning, passing, etc. Once installed, this auditing capability is available in the Developer Tools on the "Audits" tab.

This week, I've run the tool on most pages in our prototype and fixed all the Severe errors except for one, which seems to be a bug in ng2-bootstrap. I'm working on tracking that down and reporting it to them.

[tdonohue]

Also the Chrome WAVE Evaluation Tool extension from http://webaim.org/ It seems to provide more tips about page structure (e.g. there should be an <h1>) than the other tool

[tdonohue]

Talking with @dyelar on IRC, he had a local accessibility specialist run the Jaws reader against our demo site (http://ui-prototype.atmire.com/). Her comments back were:

I’d say so far so good on this. The Jaws reader was able to access and read everything I could see. And I like the way it highlights on the page when you just tab through. Will be interesting to see if it still works well when the content is fully there but it looks ok so far.

@dyelar seconded the WAVE Evaluation Tool for Chrome as well as ChromeVox screen reader. The Jaws reader is better, but you have to pay for it.