Planning your automated accessibility testing on Sauce

Accessibility testing is similar to end-to-end functional testing but there are some special considerations:

• While functional tests are aimed at testing all your functional permutations, accessibility tests need to test all your UI state permutations and device interactions. There is often a lot of overlap between the two but there are some differences. Keep this in mind and integrate the axe APIs into your tests in the places where your unique UI functionality is exposed.
• Assistive technology relies on semantics and textual attributes/information that is often invisible, so leverage the testing you can do with a tool like axe DevTools Pro to automate the regression testing of this information.
• Remember to automate all your device interaction testing like keyboard testing, including asserting that focus is maintained on the correct UI elements.

Remember that accessibility testing is the same as other forms of automation – higher investment achieves higher levels of automation, but the effort needs to be weighed against the payback. If you are releasing very often, you will want high levels of automation, whereas less frequent releases may allow for the more difficult-to-automate areas remaining a manual testing task.

Deque can help you develop your test strategy.