Accessibility Testing – how to motivate coworkers?

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, throughout the day we will be posting a few articles that hopefully would inspire you to take yet another step towards including accessibility into product roadmap.

Often we hear that implementing accessibility is difficult, costs more money and so on. This is true if we think of accessibility post engineering the product, but if we think of accessibility right at the design stage, the cost would be minimal.

Testing is important for any product to have rich quality, it’s equally important to include accessibility testing as part of the recess. It would be great if testing is carried out by variety of users including people with disabilities, elderly etc., but to get started one can perform initial audit using web based tools like WAVE by WebAIM etc.,

If you are new to accessibility and would want to bring in a fun element, a fw things that you can do is grab your team into a room, run WAVE tool on the web page and show them the number of errors, secondly and this would be usually powerful that ask teams to use the web page / app only with keyboard (without mouse). Specially, it would be an eye opener, when they interact with modal dialog boxes, drop down menus etc., One more thing that you can do is install NVDA Screen reader and ask team members to interact with app by switching off the computer screen. This way folks realize the importance of accessibility and how people with different disabilities use the internet.

So on the occasion of this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, why not doing this along with your co-workers and send in your experience!