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We wanted to test the tools that are most commonly used by developers and quality assurance testers. We chose 10 automated testing tools for our audit. To help people understand the usefulness – and the limitations – of automated tools, and to help people pick a suitable tool, we carried out an audit of some of the most common tools available.
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To be most useful, automated tools should be combined with manual inspection and user research. It can certainly help you pick up issues, but it should never be used in isolation. Or even just wrong.Ī good analogy is to think of a testing tool as like using a spellchecker. So just because a tool hasn’t picked up any accessibility issues on a website, doesn’t mean those issues don’t exist.Īnd even if they do detect a barrier, sometimes the results they give will be inconclusive or require further investigation. No tool will be able to pick up every accessibility barrier on a website. Some can be integrated into the build process, so they can identify issues almost as soon as they are created.īut while it can certainly be helpful to run an automated testing tool on a service, it’s important that teams don’t rely on them too heavily. They are quick to run and provide immediate feedback. Many of them are free and can be accessed online.Īutomated tools can be a useful and cheap way of helping you make a service more accessible. There are several available, such as Wave and Tenon. As the name suggests, they are automated tools that can be run on websites and can identify a number of issues. The pros and cons of automated toolsĪutomated accessibility testing tools can be used to identify accessibility issues on websites. In this blog post we talk about what we did and what we discovered. We built a website full of accessibility failures to test them on.
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We recently conducted an audit of automated accessibility testing tools.
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