Below Voice recognition and the adoption of voice-activated
assistants like Amazon’s Echo are rooted in technology invented
to aid disabled usersAchieve the accessible
We asked the experts about the accessibility tests and benchmarks
they use themselves
SCOTT O’HARA
“The best way to ensure a
website or application is
accessible is to verify it by
testing with real people.
WCAG conformance, meeting
the specifications of HTML
and ARIA, getting good
scores in validators and
automated checkers, those
are all good initial steps. But
a technically accessible user
interface can still produce a
poor user experience. Test
with real people to verify the
accessibility of your projects.”
NICOLAS GARNIER
“Tests nowadays are made
possible thanks to the
browsers, which provide tools
to check that good accessibility
rules are respected. Using the
Chrome Dev Tools, we can
check, for example, if a colour
has enough contrast against
its background. Using a good
code editor and a linter, we can
check that HTML tags are not
missing ARIA or alt properties.
Towards the end of a project,
it is a good idea to run a
Lighthouse test and see if the
website is performant.”ADRIÁN BOLONIO
“Automated web a11y tests
can free up our QA team from
manual testing every part
of our application but they
can’t magically make our site
accessible. We should consider
automated a11y tests as
one step of a larger testing
process. We cannot forget
that only 20 per cent to 50 per
cent of accessibility issues can
automatically be detected, so
manual testing is as important
as automated.”ZARA GEMMELL
“When it comes to creating
a benchmark for designers
and developers, we always
recommend meeting the WCAG
2.1 Level AA. There are plenty
of resources that will help you
achieve this, more specifically
the W3C, WAI and WCAG
websites will give accurate
Success Criteria to aim for.”Left Eric Bailey (@ericwbailey), Boston-
based inclusive design and accessibility
advocateThe new frontier of accessibility