Test and validate toward accessibility standards

- In any product development process, it's critical to test and validate the product with your customers. The same goes with accessibility. To verify that your products or services are accessible, you'll need to identify the most common use cases and assess them carefully. To do this, let's look at a scenario on how to use accessibility tools and manual testing to verify the accessibility of your product. Imagine you just joined a new team and you're eager to make a meaningful contribution. You've created a website but user studies reveal that people with disabilities are having a difficult time navigating your homepage. Although you might not be an accessibility expert, you know that tools like Accessibility Insights for the web will help you quickly find and fix accessibility issues. Accessibility testing tools can provide detailed information about accessibility issues within your product and how to fix those issues. When performing accessibility testing, you find that some text has insufficient contrast against the background. People who are color-blind or have low vision may have difficulty reading that text. You also find that a phrase written in Spanish has an invalid language attribute. Screen readers are likely to mispronounce that text. Additionally, some images are missing alternate text, which means people who use screen readers may miss out on that context. Now, after you've used an accessibility tool to check your code, you should perform a manual test using the keyboard. Starting at the top of the page, press the Tab key on your keyboard and verify that there is a visual focus indicator on all buttons, links, and controls. This allows people to track where they are on the page. With the keyboard, verify that you can select these buttons and links by pressing the Enter key or spacebar. People that are solely using the keyboard to navigate will need to be able to select controls on the page as someone would with the mouse. Some additional items to check for are heading structure, screen reader access and tab order. While these examples don't encompass all of the steps to test for accessibility, it's a good place to start. For more information on building accessible products, check out the Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace course here on LinkedIn Learning. I encourage you to continue learning, testing, and validating for accessibility to provide accessible and inclusive experiences for all.