The following is a list of questions to ask suppliers about their procedures and level of accessibility testing expertise. You can tell if a supplier will fulfil your needs by how they respond to queries regarding testing, training, and support.
Before hiring an accessibility testing service, you should research it thoroughly .
1. Is your website accessible and useful to disabled people?
How accessibility testing services manage their own digital footprint may reveal a lot about them. The vendor may not be a suitable fit for your firm if it hasn't taken the effort to get its accessibility in order.
2. What is the purpose of accessibility testing?
Web/mobile application accessibility testing assures that persons with disabilities such as blindness, hearing loss, and motor or cognitive impairments can use those applications. The use of web accessibility testing software ensures that all web content is freely accessible to everyone.
3. What type of testing are you going to do?
Most accessibility consultants will declare that they adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to guarantee the content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR), but not all firms will do the same testing.
Accessibility testing should determine how accessible the information is to individuals with impairments. However, the sort of testing carried out may determine how effectively or comprehensively the vendor detects accessibility issues.
Testing is frequently classified as either automated or manual. Automated testing uses tools or scans to detect potential code flaws. This type of testing is typically quick, but it isn't always thorough or correct.
The most accurate evaluation of accessibility includes, manual testing using a keyboard, a screen reader, and other assistive technologies . The best suppliers use both automated and manual testing.
4. What are the criteria or principles that you follows?
There are a variety of accessibility guidelines available, ranging from the U.S. Section 508 criteria to the Irish National IT Accessibility Guidelines. If you want to ensure that your website complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), you should use testing tools that relate to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the internationally acknowledged technical standards for online accessibility.
5. How do you account for accessibility during the quality assurance phase?
Many development organizations employ quality assurance (QA) personnel whose duty is to walk through the product's primary use cases while recording any issues they find. So, when you ask a testing service this question, listen for a response that gives you confidence that they can 1) test for accessibility and 2) log accessibility issues.
A testing service should, for example, include testing methods for accessing all functionality using only the keyboard or a mechanism to examine the quality of the developer's code using an HTML 'validator' (ask what they use).
Good accessibility testing services should provide a means to record a problem as an accessibility issue in their bug-tracking system . Ideally, this systems should give your developers information (possibly linking to WCAG-compliant procedures') to assist them in resolving accessibility issues.
