Narayanan Palani - The Web Accessibility Project: Development and Testing Best Practices

Narayanan Palani is an (quality) engineering lead in a major financial institution in the United Kingdom, leading a number of teams across different countries on test automation, accessibility, performance, and security testing interventions. Narayanan has certifications from Microsoft, Scaled Agile, DevOps Institute, International Software Testing Qualifications Board, International Software Quality Institute, with an MS in Software Engineering, Executive MBA, and a certificate of specialisation in Leadership and Management from Harvard Business School Online. His online courses are subscribed by at least 35,000+ students across 158+ countries worldwide and he is currently providing video sessions through due to the key Accessibility First Test approach on web and mobile development platforms.

DOI: 10.1201/9781003299431-1

The book you are reading right now is the result of nearly 5 years of my work as an Accessibility Evangelist by implementing digital accessibility using different testing tools that resulted in four different European Software Testing awards during 20182021. By applying the accessibility best practices I teach you in this book, you will experience an explosive results in your work and help your organization rise to a whole new level of accessibility adherence, innovation, and inclusive design. You will also gain greater work satisfaction in your life by helping improve digital accessibility for your end users. This book helps with some of the readily usable best practices to adapt web accessibility early in application development and attract potential job opportunities in leading organizations internationally.

Around 26%29% of C-Suite executives and Digital Accessibility decision-makers in the United Kingdom shared their views that they lack internal skills and experience as a barrier for delivering digital accessibility. Hence building accessibility skillset through books and internal training programs is essential to enhance digital accessibility awareness across engineering teams. Now that youre started to reading this wonderful book, let me thank you for your wonderful ambition to make a positive impact on people's life through better accessibility. If you think your professional network can be benefited from reading best practices from this book, please feel free to share the book reviews through Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels. Your positive spread of accessibility awareness will definitely give a boost to people around you to learn about accessibility to make it a better and inclusive world for everyone.

Approximately 15% of the global population is affected by some sort of disability, the opportunities to learn and adapt digital accessibility is very niche and new jobs are being created everyday across different countries to know and implement accessibility as a mandatory skill rather than a competitive advantage.

Most of the countries are increasing their legislative efforts to make web accessibility an important part in web development and testing of software releases. On the other hand, many organizations are facing extreme turbulence when not adhering to international accessibility guidelines while developing their software's and website applications) is a world renowned guideline of accessibility recommendations, which is developed through the W3C process to help organizations meet the minimum standard accessibility guidelines and it has become critical for every organization to focus on implementing the accessibility checks at every stage of their application development to avoid unaffordable mistakes.

Meanwhile it is important for front-end engineers and Quality Assurance (QA) test analysts to adhere to WCAG best practices for efficiently adapting to steps required to incorporate accessibility focused inclusive design, development and extensive accessibility testing are essential for most of the customer-facing websites. In a fast-paced world, incorporating shift left accessibility within development and testing is the new normal and this book helps developers address right accessibility attributes to UI components and focus on developing manual and automation tests for QA professionals to inject accessibility audit, accessibility functional tests, and accessibility automation tests part of their Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD) models.

In short, disability impacts everyone in life and almost 70% of disabilities are invisible, they use assistive technologies to access websites, such as screen readers, zooming text tools, or alternative mechanism to interact with websites. So test automation is not an end goal of accessibility tests and majority of the accessibility checks need to be done through screen reader and assistive technology interactions (in addition to automated tests and scans), hence the following steps of scanning the web application (SCAN) followed by series of screen reader/zoom/color-based tests (SCREEN READ) and automate part of the tests through test automation tools (AUTOMATE) are better ways of strategizing web accessibility tests through SCAN-SCREENREAD-AUTOMATE FRAMEWORK.

The ambition of this book is to help you elegantly reach your absolute best by implementing web accessibility best practices through Scan-ScreenRead-Automate to help everyone around you.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) time to time.

This book refers to WCAG version 2.1 and version 2.2 to provide best examples from author's experience across different websites, and readers are recommended to use screen readers such as NVDA (or JAWS alternatively) while performing web accessibility tests as recommended in each chapter. There may be developments and better solutions available in the near future for similar problems discussed in this book, hence readers are advised to refer to latest WCAG guidelines, government regulations to follow right suitable tests in their target websites for testing. Occasionally, few mistakes are possible while explaining the test automation code in this book in which users are recommended to post the issues in open source GitHub repositories to rectify any code issues.

First part of this book talks about different examples of defects pertaining to websites ranging from page title, heading to latest challenges like single page application's accessibility issues by narrating through fictional characters who are part of web accessibility project to implement best practices. Second part of this book talks about Cypress testing automation tool in which different essential test techniques can be implemented to evaluate web accessibility using plugins and test tricks.

Readers are expected to have

• Minimum 14 years of HTML5 experience and some development experience (preferably any front end application development such as JavaScript, React, etc.)
• Minimum 14 years of experience in any Quality Assurance(QA) roles
• Some knowledge on JavaScript to develop and test using tools such as CypressIO

While reading each chapter of this book, readers are recommended to use NVDA screen reader on your target websites to test corresponding web components for better hands-on experience. NVDA is a popular screen reader and is widely used as an open source screen reader for Windows laptops and desktops.

While writing this book, NVDA has 30% usage across the respondents to the survey of year 2021 at

Author has provided several open source projects to support the readers through his GitHub open source initiatives repositories. It is the user's responsibility to perform adequate security scans and vulnerability checks on the open source code base since author is not responsible for maintaining these free-to-use, open source repositories due to limitations in handling the code contribution from contributors across the world.