Testing for Accessibility (Windows)Sara Ford. Microsoft Corporation. March 2. 00. 4Summary: Sara Ford explains what accessibility means, and shows you how to test your applications for accessibility. Topics covered include keyboard accessibility, High Contrast, focus and selection, and Assistive Technology Compatibility. My team owns the critical aspects of the integrated shell, and I am responsible for the quality of the shell's accessibility. With new laws and regulations, accessible products are an important aspect of a developer's job. Yet, these new laws only explain what it means to be accessible. They do not describe how to make the product accessible, much less how to test for accessibility. When I first started accessibility testing three years ago, I had never heard of accessibility in terms of software. Sure, I had seen the Accessibility Options icon in my Control Panel, but that was the extent of my knowledge at that time. When I was asked to do ad- hoc accessibility testing against Visual Studio, my questions to the Program Manager were, ? How do I test using a screen reader? Microsoft Corporation. Summary: Sara Ford explains what accessibility means, and shows you how to test your applications for. Classifications of Accessibility Evaluation Tools. There are many different types of evaluation tools that can be used to determine whether or not web content is. There is a lot of information available that explains what it means to be accessible. A couple of examples are: Does your application work with a screen reader? Does your application respond to High Contrast? From a tester's perspective, we need specific details in order to test. What does a tester need to know in order to verify that something works with either an Assistive Technology device (for example, a screen reader) or an Accessibility Feature (also called High Contrast)? It is critical to know not only the what to test in terms of accessibility, but also the how to test, which is the more important concept. I discuss three categories of accessibility: Keyboard access High Contrast Assistive Technology Compatibility (specifically, screen readers)For each category, I will go into detail regarding what a tester must look for and how to find it. Accessibility Testing is a subset of usability testing, and it is performed to ensure that the application being tested is usable by people with disabilities like. Test entire websites for WCAG and Section 508 accessibility compliance. Used by federal agencies and the Fortune 100. Try now - free online trial. On Monday, IBM announced its first set of cloud-based enterprise accessibility tools - Digital Content Checker and Automated Accessibility Tester - that provide an. Listing of 540 web test tools and management tools - load testing, mobile testing, page speed testing, link checking, html validation, security testing, more. What Is Keyboard Accessibility? This requirement is the easiest of the three to test. Most people have used this category without even realizing it was related to accessibility. Anytime someone uses Ctrl+X and Ctrl+C to cut and copy text without the mouse, they are using accessibility. Let us compare the keyboard versus the mouse in this cut/paste scenario: Constants in both scenarios: Microsoft Outlook 2. Mail Message using Microsoft Word as the text editor. Cursor is at the end of the sentence to move. Move the first sentence after the second sentence. Keyboard Steps. Press Ctrl + Shift + Home. Press Ctrl+XPress Ctrl+End. Press Ctrl+VMouse Steps. Move your mouse to beginning of document Highlight the text to copy Right- click (bring up context menu) the mouse button. Select Cut. Move mouse to end of document Left- click to place the cursor. Right- click Select Paste. Although both scenarios took approximately the same amount of time (5 seconds), the process using the mouse is much longer than the keyboard steps. Another thing I noticed while timing myself was how error prone the mouse steps were. Sometimes I did not get the mouse pointer exactly at the same point as the system cursor, so I had to redo the highlight. This error took an extra few seconds to correct, even more if I did not notice it until after I had performed the paste. When testing for keyboard accessibility, keep in mind that the minimum number of keystrokes must always be used. It's either a design issue or a coding defect when too many keystrokes are used in a sequence. A design issue is using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T to perform a function, when Enter works just as well. I'll explore this example in more detail in the next section. A coding defect is when a control with a tab stop is missing its accelerator or mnemonic or underlined letter. This is the underlined letter that appears when you have checked Show extra keyboard help in programs in Control Panel - > Accessibility Options - > Keyboard Tab. Consider a dialog that has roughly twenty controls with tab stops. Suppose focus is on the 1. Furthermore, the 2. A keyboard shortcut requires just the Alt + Underlined letter, which is only two keystrokes. Providing such keystrokes is especially important for someone with a mobility disability or carpal tunnel. The what of keyboard accessibility is providing all the functionality that the mouse provides without using the mouse or mouse keys. How to Test Keyboard Accessibility Unplug your mouse. You cannot test a feature for keyboard accessibility if your mouse is only inches away from you and still plugged in for the following reasons: We are creatures of habit. We can be biased without knowing it. We might accidentally cheat. Consider reading new mail in your Outlook inbox. I always use the mouse to select a new piece of mail. Suppose the focus was not on the inbox list, but was on the folder view instead. I would have to actually look up the keyboard shortcut in the docs to get to the list view. But, I've trained myself to use the mouse to read mail. If I knew the mouse was still there, I could subconsciously use it instead of the keyboard. Trust me on this one as I have done it before. It's better to remove the mouse and avoid the temptation. Another critical point is knowing which features map one to one with the keyboard and which features do not. For example, the keyboard shortcut to drop down a combo box's list is Alt+Down Arrow. This is virtually the same thing as using the mouse to press the combo box's button. However, what's interesting is how to test drag- and- drop. In some situations, you don't want the user to literally capture an object using the keyboard and drag it to a new location. An example is dragging a toolbox icon, like a button, onto a Windows Form designer. The user simply has to press Enter for the button to appear on the designer. By the way, the keyboard shortcut to force the toolbox to appear in Visual Studio . NET is Ctrl + Alt + x. In the previous example, I mentioned the shortcut Enter. In the letter of the law, I could substitute Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T and still achieve the desired effect. Considering the spirit of the law, how intuitive is Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T compared to Enter? How will the user know to use this command, other than reading through lots of documentation? In other words, keep it simple, direct, and intuitive as possible. If the keyboard shortcut doesn't fall into one of these categories, there's a potential keyboard accessibility bug lurking around. A keyboard shortcut must never be used to replace broken keyboard functionality. For example, to check a checkbox, the user presses spacebar. If there's ever a keyboard shortcut to replace spacebar to check a checkbox, it is an accessibility bug. Check out the standard Windows XP shortcuts. If there's a keyboard shortcut that is replacing these standard keyboard shortcuts, it is most likely an accessibility bug. It goes back to the question of how would the user know. There are standard keyboard shortcuts for a reason. One final note about keyboard accessibility is that the more ways the user can perform a given task, the more accessible the functionality is. What Is High Contrast? Go to Control Panel - > Accessibility Options - > Display Tab. There's a check box for High Contrast. High Contrast modifies the operating system font size and font colors. When High Contrast is set, the High Contrast OS System bit is set. If you enjoy working outside on a laptop on sunny days, try using High Contrast Black (large) scheme to improve visibility. The difference between checking the High Contrast check box and manually customizing the display settings is that the OS System bit is set. If the user manually customizes the OS System Colors to look exactly like High Contrast Black (large) scheme, the application must respond just as it would under the High Contrast scheme. This response should occur because all colors are taken from the OS System Settings. How To Test High Contrast Always turn on High Contrast before starting your application. Supporting in- place High Contrast toggling is more difficult. If the application doesn't respond to High Contrast having been enabled prior to launch, the application is definitely not going to respond to in- place toggling. Here is a list of items to check to whether the application is responding correctly to High Contrast. Note, I'm taking these items directly from our accessibility test plan that I co- authored. Verify all user interface (UI) elements and controls are visible. If the background changes to black and the font color is hard- coded black, the application or dialog is not usable. Verify differentiable appearance of inactive and active selection. See explanation below. Verify visual focus is available in High Contrast mode. Focus must be shown at all times. A great way to find bugs is to tab around the application. If focus ever disappears, it is an accessibility bug. Verify multiple schemes function. All color schemes should work because font sizes and colors come from the operating system. However, due to time and resource constraints, it is important to test with the most commonly- used schemes, like High Contrast Black (large). With some certainty, if the application responds correctly to one scheme, it should in theory responds to all, because it is reading the color data from the same location. Only the data is changing values. Verify no text truncation occurs. There are some gray areas to test for as well. The text must be readable, yet, it's never good for text to be truncated. The rule I've been using is to say if more than 2. Verify that there are no hard- coded colors. All colors must come from the OS system settings. If the application has custom colors that cannot be mapped to the OS system settings, there must be a way for the user to customize these colors. For example, in Visual Studio, we have custom colors for squiggles.
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