Testing Your Guide for Accessibility
Automated testing
Automated tools are a great first pass for accessibility - Use these tools to check for things like color contrast, alt text on images, link text, headings, and more.
- WAVE
- SiteImprove for Chrome
Manual testing
Automated tools won’t pick up on everything, but a quick manual review can help check for a lot of other issues. Here are the 4 quick checks:
- Ensure the page has keyboard access and that you are able to navigate through the page using the tab and arrow keys
- Zoom the screen to 200% and make sure no content was lost horizontally (i.e. a user should not have to scroll left or right to access any content)
- Check for accurate page titles in the tabs of the browser
- For media content, check that there is an alternative available (captions, transcription, or audio description)
Screen reader testing
Users with a visual impairment rely on screen reading software to access guides. Testing with this software allows you to discover inaccessible aspects in your guides.
- VoiceOver for Macs
- NVDA for Windows
- JAWS (free until June 30, 2020)
Testing Your Guide for Responsiveness
Mobile devices testing
Springshare uses responsive design, but text-heavy and multi-column guides can appear cluttered and unreadable on tablets and smartphones. Try out your site on a variety of devices to see how it might affect the user's experience.
If you don't have multiple devices available for testing, you can borrow them from the User Research Center at Lamont Library.
Browser testing
Although Springshare supports the most recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE, text or image-heavy and tabbed guides may vary in how they appear in different browsers.
Sometimes when copying and pasting into guides, we forget to eliminate Word or other coding. Some browsers are more forgiving, and errant code doesn't appear on published guides; in other browsers, users will see the code.
Try opening your guides in each of the different browsers to see if content displays the same across them and then make adjustments as necessary.