QA and accessibility testing

Most QA testers need to learn a thing or three about accessibility testing

Quality Assurance (QA) teams don't know how to do accessibility testing. There! I said it.

Now, don't you go and get upset if you work in QA and do know how to review for accessibility. The reality is that most of your colleagues don't have a clue.

These days, most of QA work seems to be done by running automated test suites and smoke tests.

Very few QA folks I speak to know or understand basic HTML. Understanding HTML is critical to understanding what's going on if you have markup issues causing accessibility issues.

Very few QA folks I interact with know how to use screen readers. Not even the very basics. Or if they've played with screen readers, it leads to misunderstanding like thinking you need to add a tabindex="0" to every single element so a screen reader user can tab and read each element (this is something that happens more than I care to really think about).

Maybe not everyone on a QA team needs to have a basic understanding of how to do accessibility testing. But at least one person on the team needs to be able to run these tests.

If you rely on a 3rd party accessibility auditors to do the job your internal QA teams should be able to do, it'll cost you a lot more money and time.