Accessibility Advice
A good starting point for learning about the accessibility requirements is the Jisc Meeting accessibility regulations.
Testing
It is much easier to build accessible websites if the accessibility requirements are considered from an early stage of development. Several browser plugins are available which can assist with this and can be used on development versions of websites running locally as well as on live websites. The following two plugins are similar but have different strengths.
- Silktide - This plugin is particularly useful for its simulators including being able to change the appearance of colours and its screen reader emulator.
- Accessibility Insights for Web - This plugin combines automated tests with a guided walk through of a full accessibility assessment.
Tools, such as these, are unable to test all accessibility requirements, but they generally give a good starting point. The tools, commonly, give an indication of the sections of the accessibility requirements that cannot be tested automatically - allowing these to be manually checked.
Testing Accessibility During Continuous Integration
We use the Pa11y CI tool as one part of our continuous integration (CI) pipeline. This allows us to automatically test any changes we make to our websites. We deploy a test version of the website in the CI pipeline and use Pa11y CI to automatically check many of the accessibility requirements. Pa11y CI has not been updated for the latest accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.2) so we are moving towards a CI pipeline that uses Pa11y in Jest for our own internal testing. However, only one of the additions requirements in WCAG 2.2 can be detected by automated tests so there is limited benefit to updating the testing for existing websites. If you are interested in learning how we use Pa11y or would like help in setting up automated tesing please contact the Research Software Group.
Colours
A common problem for websites is the selection of colour combinations with suitable contrast. We have found Color Review to be a good way to see instantaneously how a colour combination looks.