Advanced Selenium Web Accessibility Testing

Software Automation Testing Secrets Revealed

Narayanan Palani

• Publisher: Momentum Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781949449440
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Control y garantía de calidad

This book explains the steps necessary to write manual accessibility tests and convert them into automated selenium-based accessibility tests to run part of regression test packs.

If you are searching a topic on Google or buying a product online, web accessibility is a basic need. If a web page is easier to access when using a mouse and complex to navigate with keyboard, this is extremely difficult for users with disabilities. Web Accessibility Testing is a most important testing practice for customers facing web applications.

This book explains the steps necessary to write manual accessibility tests and convert them into automated selenium-based accessibility tests to run part of regression test packs. WCAG and Section 508 guidelines are considered across the book while explaining the test design steps. Software testers with accessibility testing knowledge are in high demand at large organizations since the need to do manual and automated accessibility testing is growing rapidly. This book illustrates the types of accessibility testing with test cases and code examples.

CHAPTER 1

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Introduction: Accessibility Tester—A Great Futuristic Manual Testing Role

Web accessibility is an art of building the website for users with disabilities such as physical, vision, cognitive, and hearing disabilities. Remember that everyone of us will become disabled and need better accessibility in some way, sometime, in our lives naturally!

Approximately 1.3 billion people are affected by some form of visual impairment as per World Health Organization report, ‘Blindness and vision impairment’ dated 11 October 2018. Internet has changed people’s life and most of the daily work has been heavily relying on websites for day-to-day activities such as accommodation arrangements, travel, food, and other basic necessities. Though websites are built with customer needs in mind, not all the websites are accessible for users with disabilities! Accessibility defects are very important and hard to replicate by testers who are not experienced such situations in their life.

Information Technology industry has been growing rapidly and there is a strong need for differently abled or physically challenged engineers to take a step forward and say what is wrong on the web pages they access in day-to-day life! When I met a friend, who has Group 2 Low vision on both eyes, he expressed his hard feelings on accessing a career website since he could not navigate to expected section of the web page using his mobile voice over. Similarly, another friend who is short could not understand ATM bank machine voice over to navigate to next screen when there is only limited text has been read from the voice recorder and It was difficult for him to see what is there displayed on ATM machine screen. This is extremely difficult for a normal tester to find these bugs whereas engineers with similar disabilities could easily catch these defects and log them part of ‘accessibility defects lists’ hence there is a growing need to look for testers with disabilities in recent times. When I gave a demo of selenium based automated accessibility tests to group of engineers in Central ­London, United Kingdom, few among the audiences were actually attended the session to hire engineers for their software teams! Main challenge in finding right resource for accessibility testing is awareness of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards among software testers. Even though WCAG has been documented with great examples on websites, there is no much experienced project engineers on the ground to explain on the implementation. This book has been written in order to explain few accessibility test implementation possibilities on manual and automated testing. JavaScript has been used on automation test framework to showcase test examples throughout this book since NodeJS ecosystem is growing with various ‘wonderful’ test automation tools such as webdriverio (selenium), backstopJS and cucumberjs; Few examples are provided in java programming but the focus is more on ‘accessibility test’ rather than ‘automated test.’ If readers interested to learn more on automation test code examples, it is highly advisable to read my previous writings on ‘Software Automation Testing Secrets Revealed part 1 and 2.’

1.1 Future of Manual Testing

There are debates across the IT industry that the manual testing is going to go away and automation testing is going to take over most of the jobs! This is a true nature of future toward more test automation but manual ­testers knowing accessibility testing are expected to remain niche resources in near future!

Having compliant to international standards such as WCAG or ­section 508 is one of the mandatory needs for large customer facing organizations. When accessibility requirements are to be met, there is a strong need to hire manual testers who have great exposure toward accessibility and testing of such accessibility needs.

When automation testing tools such as selenium and UFT are in great demand, market also looking for manual testing who got exposures to JAWS or NVDA based accessibility testing.

Users with disability are more often using voice assistance such as JAWS or NVDA kind of tools to access the websites or applications on desktop in order to hear the voice from the respective websites. When using mobile phones, talkback is one of the famous options to hear the voice for the usage of particular website and access any applications from mobile.

There is a strong reason that not all the accessibility testing can be automated using tools such as selenium! Reason being, the experience of accessibility testing is really important when accessing the target application under test (AUT). This would explore more accessibility problems rather than relying on automated brainless tools to perform the actions for the test users.

1.2 How to Experience or Learn Accessibility Testing?

If you are interested to learn accessibility testing, it is as simple as searching ‘NVDA’ in Google and installing it on your desktop in order to start using it for every other keyboard movement on the website or AUT where accessibility needs to be verified!

Readers are recommended to watch a video related to NVDA with title ‘NVDA: The free software empowering blind people world-wide’ on YouTube URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ks7AwV_uxO0

Once using NVDA or JAWS in desktop, kindly requesting readers to avoid using mouse or reduce the usage of mouse at least on the target AUT in order to verify the nature of the application.

1.3 Accessibility Testing

Users with disabilities such as visually impaired or ‘physically challenged’ (term used in this section as ‘special users’) are required accessible web applications for ease of use. This has been suggested as part of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (known as ‘WCAG’)/General Services Administration Section 508 Standards (known as ‘Section 508’) in detail. Providing proper text for each section of the page and facilitating best user experience on the web pages are very important while providing accessibility features to web a...