Member-only story
Automated Accessibility Testing
Static analysis checkers, CI tools, unit tests, and more
As more and more companies focus on making their apps accessible, a question that often comes up is “How do we make sure we don’t let things slip?” We’ve done all this work to remediate our app, but how do we make sure we don’t dig ourselves back into a hole six months later and end up in a similar situation that we are in now? How do we keep things accessible?
There are a few solutions. The first is education and training. Everyone in the company needs to be an accessibility advocate and understand accessibility best practices. The second is better organizational processes. Companies should include accessibility audits in natural checkpoints throughout the software development lifecycle, like when UX provides design mockups to the engineering team or when the engineering team is code complete on a new feature. The third is automated testing, and that’s what I’d like to focus on today.
Disclaimer
As a brief disclaimer before we begin, I want to emphasize that when it comes to accessibility there is no adequate alternative to good manual testing with a mouse, keyboard, and screen reader. Ask any accessibility consultant, and they will tell you the same thing.
The hangup is that engineers are often dissatisfied with that answer. Engineers like to automate everything. Manual testing sounds tedious, and it doesn’t scale.
And, you would be right. Those are fair concerns. So, let’s take a look at some of the automated tools we have available and examine their benefits as well as their drawbacks.
Automated Accessibility Tools
There are several good tools that can assist us in our accessibility efforts. Some of the common tools that I’ve used are ESLint plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y, tools from Deque like the axe DevTools Chrome extension or the axe Monitor web crawler, and CI tools like Google Lighthouse or GitLab CI/CD with Pa11y.
The thing to know about all of these tools is that they are all static analysis checkers.
Static analysis checkers examine the code, whether that be the JavaScript source code or the built HTML on…
