Struggling with accessibility testing in Chrome? Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered! Our blog will explore various Chrome tools and techniques to help you implement effective accessibility testing, ultimately guiding you to create more inclusive web experiences for your users.
With strict international accessibility laws, ensuring that digital products are accessible to all users is essential, not optional. Since Google Chrome is the most widely used browser globally, it offers a variety of tools and extensions for accessibility testing Chrome.
The Importance of Accessibility
Before we dive deep into the technical areas of this process, let us understand why it is an important part of the modern application development culture:
- An accessible website can be used even by people with disabilities. This means that it has a crucial role in massively increasing the possible audience reach for your company and bringing in more customers. This broader reach can also convert into higher traffic with better engagement.
- Due to the recent overhaul in Google search engine analytics, modern search results prefer websites that are accessible. So, if you create such a website, there is a high possibility that you will end up ranking higher than the non-accessible websites.
- Finally, accessibility features, including keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and readable fonts, help improve the overall user experience for all end users. This rule is also applicable to users who do not have disabilities.
Chrome DevTools
Chrome DevTools provides a powerful set of development tools. This option is natively integrated with the Google Chrome browser and can be accessed directly. Using this tool, the developers will have access to a massive range of features for inspecting and optimizing the performance of the web application.
Chrome DevTools also provides various dedicated features to check the accessibility of the website and ensure its overall performance irrespective of the device or usage preferences.
Let us now divert our attention toward some of the major functions and advantages of integrating Chrome DevTools with modern accessibility testing.
- Inspecting The Accessibility Tree
The Accessibility Tree is a graphical representation of the Document Object Model (DOM) that helps illustrate how assistive technologies, like screen readers, interpret the structure of a webpage. You can use various extensions offered by different platforms to enhance this process.
Simply follow the steps given below:
- Begin by opening Chrome DevTools, right-clicking on the web page, and clicking the inspect options that will be available in the drop-down menu.
- After this, you have to navigate to the elements panel that will be available in the inspection toolbar.
- The final step in this process is to right-click on an element and select inspect accessibility properties.
- By selecting this option, you’ll be able to see the accessibility properties of the selected element. These properties will include its role, name, and whether it is accessible or not. This approach is important to ensure screen readers and other assistive technologies can correctly interpret the given content.
- Simulating Visual Deficiencies
Ensuring proper color contrast is a very important part of accessibility testing with Chrome. This is because users with visual deficiencies like color blindness can have difficulty understanding different colors. In this regard, Chrome DevTools will allow you to simulate various types of color blindness.
Do you want to simulate this process with Chrome DevTools? Simply follow the steps that we have mentioned below:
- Begin the process by opening Chrome DevTools and navigating to the rendering tab. The rendering tab will be available under the “More Tools” option in the drop-down menu.
- The final step in this process is to go to the “Emulate Visual Deficiency” section and select a type of color blindness that you want to simulate, depending on your testing requirements.
By executing this simulation, you can identify and fix color contrast issues. The final goal of this process is to ensure that the website is visually accessible to all your users to provide an inclusive experience.
- Lighthouse Audits
Have you heard about Lighthouse? It is an open-source automated tool built into Chrome DevTools. It helps audit web pages for performance, accessibility, and many other parameters. The audit reports provided by Lighthouse give you a comprehensive idea of potential issues about accessibility, along with suggestions for implementing improvements.
Want to run a lighthouse audit on your website? Just follow the steps that we have given below in the correct chronological order:
- Initiate Chrome DevTools and click on the lighthouse tab that will be available in the drop-down menu.
- Select accessibility to run the audits for this parameter. In case you also want to include other categories, you can click them here as well.
- The final step is to click Generate Report and wait for Chrome DevTools to run the audit and display the final results.
Lighthouse audits will provide you with a score based on the implementation of the category that you have chosen in the audit report. It will also provide you with a list of actionable recommendations to improve the overall accessibility of your website.
Best Practices For Accessibility Testing
To properly build an accessible website, you simply cannot rely only on tools. So, we have mentioned some of the best practices that we highly recommend the testers include within their development environment to further improve this process:
- Semantic HTML
One of the most effective ways of ensuring an accessible website is the inclusion of Semantic HTML. These HTML tags provide meaningful context to assistive technologies. So, this approach is very important to make the websites easier for users to navigate.
- Keyboard Navigation
Testers must ensure that their website is fully accessible using a keyboard. Many users with disabilities rely on keyboard navigation instead of traditional mouse navigation. To implement this process, you can test your website by tabbing through all interactive elements, including links, buttons, and forms.
This approach will help you to ensure that these elements are focusable and actionable.
- Real Device Testing
Testers must implement real device testing with accessibility testing Chrome. This is because it will help you to understand that all the implemented accessibility parameters are accessible on real devices. Since it is very expensive and hectic to set up a physical device lab, you can integrate cloud platforms like LambdaTest.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test execution platform that lets you perform manual and automated testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations.
You can also integrate Selenium ChromeDriver with LambdaTest to integrate automated cross-browser testing on web applications. To shed more light on the segment, we have mentioned a sample code snippet that will help you perform the same.
- Alt Text For Images
We recommend the testers always provide descriptive alt text for images. In this context, alt text is used by screen readers to describe the context of images to users who cannot see these images. This approach is very important to understand the context of images. It becomes especially useful when the image conveys important messages or is an important part of the entire web content.
- ARIA
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. Its rules and attributes help the testers enhance the accessibility of dynamic content and complex user interface components.
We caution the testers to use ARIA as a supplement to Semantic HTML and not as its complete replacement. This will help you to ensure the proper combination of required HTML technologies.
- Responsive Design
Responsive design is a very important element of the modern application development and testing process. This practice involves ensuring that your application can adapt to the changing resolution, screen size, and other variations of modern displays. So, while implementing accessibility testing on web apps, it is also important to ensure that they are responsive as well.
The testers can also use cloud platforms like LambdaTest to perform automated responsive design testing on their modern apps.
- Testing With Real Users
As we already mentioned earlier, there are various parameters of an accessible website that cannot be tested using automated tools or other technologies. To properly utilize the functioning of these parameters, you have to deploy real users. So, we suggest testers use real users with disabilities to verify the functioning of their accessible web apps.
A great way of implementing this approach would be deploying beta versions to a selected group of users and running a targeted survey based on the response from this audience group. You can make the required changes in this phase and then deploy the final version of the application for the general users.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we went through in this article, we can safely conclude that accessibility testing is a very important part of inclusive web development. Accessibility testing Chrome ensures that the web pages are usable by everyone including people with disabilities.
You should also remember that tools alone aren’t enough to ensure proper accessibility testing. You should also adopt the best practices that we mentioned in this article. By regularly running the test cases and including real users, the testers can catch errors that automated tools might overlook.
It is true that accessibility testing still has a significant amount of challenges but it doesn’t mean that you can compromise with the implementation of this process. By staying informed and proactive, you can ensure that your web apps not only meet legal standards but also provide a seamless and inclusive experience to all users.
Ultimately, you should always remember that accessibility testing isn’t about providing access to your web application but it is about creating a web that is open and usable for everyone.