Web A11y Testing Demo

Web Accessibility Testing Demo

About This Site

This website presents a series of pages that demonstrate common issues that can affect the accessibility core concepts explored on the WSU digital accessibility website and how to test for them.

This site was prepared by Daniel Rieck (daniel.rieck@wsu.edu), a web coordinator working in the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President at WSU. The site was used as part of a presentation on web accessibility testing for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) 2024 and WordPress Accessibility Day 2025. The idea behind the site is to determine if you can spot accessibility issues through manual testing and compare your findings with what is reported by automated issue testing from the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation tool. The organization of the site is inspired by the core concepts check sheet.

Rationale

Rationale #1: Testing Is Needed

Testing is needed because web content is inherently multilingual. Whether we realize it, we are using both written language and computer code whenever we publish content to the web. It is easy to be unaware of this fact because content authoring tools are like invisible language translators. They do most of the work to translate our thoughts into written language encapsulated in often invisible computer code.

Translations are better tested than trusted. Whether we are interested in the computer-code language layer of our work, the fact is assistive technologies depend on computer code to function. So, just as written language errors cause confusion, computer code “language errors” cause accessibility issues. Digital accessibility testing enables us to assess the understandability of computer code underlying web content to assistive technologies.

Rationale #2: Automated Testing Cannot Replace Manual Testing

Why spend time in manual testing when you can get a tool to automate the process for you? The answer is simple: Automated testing alone is not sufficient. Automated testing can identify only a fraction of the possible accessibility issues that can affect website. The exercise facilitated by this website of comparing manual to automated testing will demonstrate how automated accessibility testing only goes so far—and not far enough.

Demos of Accessibility Errors with Core Concepts

This demo site contains the following pages that have been built for understanding and testing for types of accessibility issues that affect accessibility core concepts: