Twenty percent of the population has impairments that make it difficult for them to use your application. What are you doing about it? Functional testing an app is not enough. In this episode, Manoj Kumar will discuss some ways to add accessibility testing to your suite. Manoj will also explain what accessibility testing actually is, and will outline some tools and techniques that can make your development process more inclusive and will help you create apps that will delight your customers.

About Manoj Kumar

Manoj Kumar is a Principal Test Automation Consultant and a Steering committee member of the Selenium Project. He has architected many automated testing solutions using tools in the Selenium ecosystem for both web and mobile apps. He is an open-source enthusiast and has contributed to different libraries such as Selenium, ngWebDriver, Serenity and Protractor. He is also the author of a Selenium blog AssertSelenium. He is working at Applitools making web apps ‘visually perfect’.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Accessibility is all about making applications accessible for people who are not normal users like how we do. So if you have to tell them in other ways it means that making applications accessible for people with disabilities are people with limited interaction. So but I mean limited interaction. It covers people with reasonable impairments auditory impairments or any such cognitive impairments.
  
• So at least one in five people are in some kind of impairments around the world. So it’s very important to have them in mind before we creating anything. So now digital is being a new world taking over having applications accessible while on the go like mobile to wearables and all that. It also makes sense to have applications accessible for those people. So governments are taking that into priority and making that as part of mandatory. So if you take many countries around the world are making that as mandatory compliance to be met before making an application.
  
• Many deverlopers are always yrying to make shiny new UIs. When we all do that it also very important to keep accessibility in mind. From a business point of view as I mentioned the stats say that one in five people. So let’s not leave the 20 percent population of the world –let’s target those users too.
  
• Just just making a friendly disclaimer that always manual testing is important. And also with regards to accessibility testing, it really helps you a lot in terms of looking out manually on finding accessibility flaws. And also it makes more sense when you have people with such impairments who test your applications. So you may get a lot more defect than what you find. Because you’ve been doing it manually.
  
• The best piece of advice would be again to establish an org level commitments. Maybe find key stakeholders within your company and make them responsible for accessibility. Give some time to learn about accessibilities and that’s something very important. Encourage the UX architects are people who designed the UX using gel. The global experience language to design UX wireframes more accessible way. And most importantly have the developers use these tools as they develop the UI components so that we check these accessibility defects right when they develop and let’s not push it later to the testers or even the actual people with impairments.
  

Connect with Manoj Kumar

• Twitter:@manoj9788
• Blog: assertselenium
• Company: Applitools

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