The way we perceive knowledge has changed in the last decade. People spend more time on the internet searching for their area of interest. News, entertainment, medicines, cooking, and a lot more. An to add to it, learning over the internet is gaining its momentum with this behaviour. Now people from every age prefer to learn online as it is the easiest mode. But as the age grows the body weakens and this leads to week eyesight, blindness, hearing loss, and others. This raises the need for more accessible content, it could be a website or a video. let’s have a look over some of the process which software QA companies follow.
Transcripts and captions on videos:
Closed captions and transcripts are vital to the accessibility of media like videos. These are supporting text of the audio content which are available with the video. They should include spoken dialogue, relevant sounds, and other contextual elements, like music.
Testing for captions and transcripts is very easy. Play a video and see if there is a Button or an option to turn on the closed captions. Most of the time they will appear without any option for turning them off. Make sure the button works with a mouse and keyboard.
Alt text for images and other non-text content
Images and other non-text content should have an alternative text, like “Graphs, Media Files, Animations, Audio alerts. This alt tag is always read or displayed when the parent content is missing. To check the alt text, you can use a screen reader or other assistive technology. If you are a technical person, you can review the code and see if the alt attributes are available or not. For example, you can use the browser addons to check the alt text of any image. The developer console is best used in this case.
For digital accessibility, color contrast is very critical. Color contrast is the difference in light between the font and its background. By using sufficiently-contrasting colors, a website’s font visibility is strong enough to distinguish for most people.
Color Contrast is a numerical value that identifies the level of contrast. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) success criterion 1.4.3 states that normal text must meet a small contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 and large text (18 point or larger, or 14 points or larger and bold) must meet the least contrast ratio of at least 3:1.
keyboard friendly website
Many people cannot use a mouse or they do not want to use it, instead, they prefer the keyboard or a keyboard emulator. They use a keyboard for browsing the internet or reading an article online. For such people who use alternative input devices, it’s essential it’s essential that every link, field, or control works by Keyboard inputs along with the mouse.
Keyboard testing is something you can try yourself right now. Start pressing and release the “TAB” key and see the position of the cursor, it will show you the hotspot which you can click. You can also press Enter or Return key at this spot for activating the function linked to it. SHIFT + TAB also showcase some other functions. During this testing, if you notice that you cannot reach certain elements or you have lost focus. Then this brings and keyboard accessibility issue, raise it to your developer.
It’s a WCAG rule that content on a webpage should be zoomed to 200% and still work without assistive technology. Additionally, screen magnification should not interfere with other accessibility requirements.
Zoom your web browser to 200% and see what happens to the content and layout of the webpage. You can notice that content elements should not overlap or disappear, or they do stack and adjust.
Also, you can check that you use mouse and keyboard both for performing tasks on webpages. Although this preliminary testing is not exhaustive, but it can help in common issues.