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I'd like to make sure I'm testing more of the website that I work on to make sure they're as accessible as possible. I want to do more than just run sites thro

I'd like to make sure I'm testing more of the website that I work on to make sure they're as accessible as possible. I want to do more than just run sites through validators. Is JAWS still a good accessibility program to test with? Are there other major accessibility programs I should be testing with?

markholmes 7y ago
I’m not the parent comment, but VoiceOver and NVDA are great text-to-speech screen readers.
mltony 7y ago
The big three are Jaws and NVDA for Windows and VoiceOver for Mac. You probably don't need to test with all three every time since they are similar in terms of what kind of content they can access on the pages. But each of them has its own quirks, there are web-pages that only one of them can read.
- ncallaway 7y ago
  That's great. I can push to rotate between those three on deployments. I've typically only tested with one, so it'd be good to ensure there's nothing weird with others. Thanks!
limograf 7y ago
There are so many great tools out there now. Lighthouse in Chrome Devtools has an Access audit built in which will give you a few hints. There's also a very useful auditor that just came out from Paciello Group called the Arc toolkit: https://www.paciellogroup.com/toolkit/ https://www.paciellogroup.com/toolkit/. Chromevox and Voiceover can be turned on to get quick screenreader-ish feedback. No Coffee: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbnhckmgdhmgdckeigabjfbddl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbn... is quite useful to get a non-scientific empathy hit for graphic decisions and how that interacts with common sight problems (98% of people by age 51 have presbyopia) and Sim Daltonism: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ will give you a more accurate representation of all the most common colour blindnesses (1 in 12 men). I also urge everyone to turn ON tabbing on their Mac (System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab > All Controls) and tab into their sites (unplug your mouse). I also often do a run through with Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/ https://vimium.github.io/ which gives me some aspects of a voice interaction type system. These tools will get you some of the way there, though there are established ways to build components which will solve 90% of all known access problems. The main solution is simply to write native HTML. A major issue is how hard it is to style native form elements (like datalist) -- it means developers can't get it past design/clients.

markholmes 7y ago

I’m not the parent comment, but VoiceOver and NVDA are great text-to-speech screen readers.

mltony 7y ago

The big three are Jaws and NVDA for Windows and VoiceOver for Mac. You probably don't need to test with all three every time since they are similar in terms of what kind of content they can access on the pages. But each of them has its own quirks, there are web-pages that only one of them can read.

ncallaway 7y ago
That's great. I can push to rotate between those three on deployments. I've typically only tested with one, so it'd be good to ensure there's nothing weird with others. Thanks!

limograf 7y ago

There are so many great tools out there now. Lighthouse in Chrome Devtools has an Access audit built in which will give you a few hints. There's also a very useful auditor that just came out from Paciello Group called the Arc toolkit: https://www.paciellogroup.com/toolkit/ https://www.paciellogroup.com/toolkit/. Chromevox and Voiceover can be turned on to get quick screenreader-ish feedback. No Coffee: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbnhckmgdhmgdckeigabjfbddl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbn... is quite useful to get a non-scientific empathy hit for graphic decisions and how that interacts with common sight problems (98% of people by age 51 have presbyopia) and Sim Daltonism: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ will give you a more accurate representation of all the most common colour blindnesses (1 in 12 men). I also urge everyone to turn ON tabbing on their Mac (System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab > All Controls) and tab into their sites (unplug your mouse). I also often do a run through with Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/ https://vimium.github.io/ which gives me some aspects of a voice interaction type system. These tools will get you some of the way there, though there are established ways to build components which will solve 90% of all known access problems. The main solution is simply to write native HTML. A major issue is how hard it is to style native form elements (like datalist) -- it means developers can't get it past design/clients.