Testing for Accessibility
Today, there are several ways to test your application for accessibility:
- Use standard desktop personal computers and software in different ways
- Use accessibility testing tools
- Use assistive technologies
- Use assistive technology vendors and users during the development process
An example of the first method of using standard desktop personal computers is to unplug your mouse and try to navigate your application using only the keyboard. Is there documentation on how to use the tab, arrow, and shortcut keyboard keys? This approach will uncover where you need to implement keyboard access and how to do it in a way that is usable. Making Your Application Keyboard Accessible will help you in your implementation.
The second way to test your application for accessibility is to use an accessibility test tool. The Accerciser tool is one which you can use to help test the accessibility of your application. For example, accerciser will display each component's accessibility information (e.g. accessible names, descriptions, relationships, etc). A developer can use the tools to ensure that relevant information is available on components.
The third way to test your application for accessibility is to test your application with an assistive technology that presents your application in the form needed for a specific disability. There are a number of different GNOME assistive technologies being developed today:
The Orca screen reader being developed by Sun Microsystems at gnome.org.
The LSR screen reader being developed by IBM Corp. at gnome.org.
The GNOME Onscreen Keyboard (GOK) being developed by the University of Toronto for users with mobility difficulties.
The fourth way to test your applications for accessibility is to involve assistive technology vendors and users who have disabilities in your development process.
Accessibility testing checklist
Follow this testing checklist that explains how to use accerciser and a screen reader to test your GNOME or GTK+ application for accessibility.
Later: Add more details for testing with specific screen readers.
- Fully run your application using only the keyboard to ensure each component which performs a user function can be accessed through the keyboard.
- Ensure the keyboard focus is set to a component when a window is activated.
Use accerciser to analyze each component for accessibility
Ensure each relevant component has implemented AtkObject and other ATK interfaces as needed (e.g. AtkAction, AtkHypertext, AtkTable, AtkRelations, AtkImage, AtkText, AtkSelection, AtkState, etc)
- Ensure each accessibility field is filled in appropriately
- Ensure there is an accessible action set for components which can be activated with a mouse or keyboard
- Ensure components have proper labels.
- Listening to a Linux screen reader output and/or viewing the output window, make sure text and components are spoken properly
- Ensure text is echoed when you type characters
- Ensure highlighted text is spoken
- Ensure component labels are spoken
- Ensure icon descriptions are set and spoken by a Linux screen reader
- For each component, verify that the Accessible Action works as you intended
- Make sure that all text and components in the visible parts of your application are read out loud and/or displayed in an output window.
The GNOME Foundation provides a set of test cases for testing general Linux software accessibility enablement in your application using keyboard navigation, Accerciser, Orca, LSR, GOK, system themes (fonts and colors), and the mouse. Refer to the IBM Accessibility Guidelines for a complete set of checkpoints against which you should test your Linux application for accessibility. Eventually we (the AC Test lab) want to add a complete set of Linux accessibility tests to all the IBM Accessibility Guidelines using a more developed Linux screen reader (Orca or LSR), Accerciser, and a Linux magnifier.
If your Linux application is a Web browser, you should also test the user agent accessibility compliance of your application using the W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Test Suite.