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Neha Sharma
Neha Sharma

Posted on • Originally published at a11ytips.dev

Accessibility Automated Tools - What to Expect

There are a few popular tools available for the accessibility testing such as Lighthouse, AXE Tool , and plugins.

Developers and Testers expect that these tools magically help them cover 100% accessibility issues. However, accessibility tools cannot provide you 100% cover from the issues but it can help you to atleast report some % of issues and how to fix them.

Today we are going to learn the issues automated took can and cannot report:

Common Tools

Can Can't
alt tags Can identify if alt tags are missing Can't identify if alt tags are meaningful
Labels Can identify if labels are missing & order is incorrect -
Color contrast Can identify if color contrast is failing Can't identify if color contrast on images and gradient
Focus - Can't identify if the focus order is correct
Order of Headings Can identify if order of H1-H6 is correct -
ARIA Can identify if ARIA tag is missing Can't identify if the usage is correct
Role & landmarks Can identify if ARIA role and landmarks is missing Can't identify if the usage is correct
Semantic - Can't identify if the semantic tags are used or not
Responsive - Tools cannot identify if app is not responsive
Experience - Can't identify if the experience of assistive technologies is similar to non-assistive technologies

The above points are important to understand the scope of automated testing. While using the tools one should be aware 'what' the tools will be testing and do the manual testing of 'what cannot' be tested by tools.

Happy Learning!!

Top comments (4)

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hellonehha profile image
Neha Sharma

Absolutely right. 100 scores, 0 issues is not the indicator of application is accessible. Thank you for sharing your experience

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francoisaudic

Nice article ! (Just a little error in the table last cell, it is assistive technologies not assertive)

It shows how much of the accessiblity testing rely on the human analysis.

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hellonehha profile image
Neha Sharma

<3 Thank you for highlighting. Fixed :)