Tools

A software tester’s accessibility testing toolkit should contain various tools, both to help testers “walk in the shoes” of their users and to quickly flag obvious problems and expose accessibility features (or a lack of them). High performance is only achievable with human skill, but these tools will help you uncover potential issues and make your product a better user experience for a wider audience.

Discussions on what constitutes a “proper implementation” of test automation often focus on what tool you should use, but that is only one part of the equation. Bas Djikstra details four other things you should consider, how they contribute to the success of your test automation, and what risks are associated with failing to pay proper attention to each of them.

If you're uncertain about where to focus your testing or what kind of testing you should be doing, look at what your users are telling you. Understanding the analytics of how your customers use your application can help you improve your test efforts. This article explores instances of how this data can inform user interface automation, compatibility testing, and web services tests.

Many automation tools have a mechanism for storing data used in their test scripts. Typically, the specifics of this mechanism is different across tools, making it difficult to use this data outside the tool itself. Using an external, reusable data source allows organizations to avoid the cost of migrating or duplicating existing data, thereby future-proofing their frameworks.