How to test the accessibility of your app?
There are several ways to test the accessibility of your app, we divide them in three main categories: automated, manual and user testing. Each of these types of tests has thier benefits and limitations.
Automated testing
You can find a lot of issues, but since everything is automated there might be many duplications. Currently there are a limited number of providers to automate the testing of your app. Automate the testing of your apps is a big challenge because the results might deviate quite a lot based on the platform (iOS / Android) or framework that is used. Most solutions require you to access your source code. Only a few weeks ago we launched Abra Desktop, which can test any app on several (repeating) issues without requiring access to your source code. Automated testing is a great way to identify a limited amount of issues that can occur multiple times on every screen. Automated testing can not fully test according to the EN standard.
Manual testing
To get a full picture of the accessibilty of your app you need manual testing. It is more time consuming, requires experiences and knowledge about accessbility. You go through the entire app screen by screen and test with (and without) assistive technology to see how the app reacts. In all our audits we test with an external keyboard, text scaling and the screen reader.
User testing
Not to many apps are ready for user based testing yet. It can be used to create awareness in your team. Testing with users is one of the later steps to consider, once your organisation is getting more mature in terms of accessibility (testing). If the groundwork is not there you won't get the most valuable feedback. Users tend to give feedback that exceeds the requirements from the standard. In the long run user testing can improve the experience of user significantly.
How to approach testing
Start with automated testing and do it a lot, especially in the beginning. Testing automatically is a relatively cheap way to get started. Use it to monitor the quality of your apps for the long run.
Add multiple cycles of manual testing, do it often and intensify the scope and depth of your tests. Start with easy to fix, high impact issues. Continue with big projects with high impact and slowly move to smaller projects.
Once you're comfortable about your projects accessibility slowly start to integrate user testing. If you start with it to early in the process it is a relatively expensive way to find issues you could easily have found by manually / automatically testing. But it is great to raise awarenes..
We wrote a blog post about it: "What if you had a limited budget for accessibility?".