Accessibility Testing

Problem

Accessibility violations ship to production because manual testing with screen readers is time-consuming and easy to skip. Missing alt text, poor color contrast, keyboard traps, and ARIA errors exclude users with disabilities and create legal compliance risks.

Solution

Integrate automated accessibility audits into your test suite using tools that check for ARIA errors, color contrast violations, and missing alt text. Combine these with manual screen reader testing for complex interactions to catch issues before they reach production.

Example

This example demonstrates automated accessibility testing using axe-core to validate that a component meets WCAG standards and doesn’t have common accessibility violations.

// Import the axe accessibility testing library
import { axe } from 'jest-axe';

test('navigation should be accessible', async () => {
  // Render the navigation component
  const { container } = render(<Navigation />);

  // Run axe accessibility audit on the rendered component
  const results = await axe(container);

  // Assert that no accessibility violations were found
  expect(results).toHaveNoViolations();
});

Benefits

• Catches accessibility violations early in development before they reach production.
• Reduces legal compliance risks related to WCAG standards and ADA requirements.
• Improves user experience for everyone, not just users with disabilities.
• Automates detection of common issues like missing alt text and poor contrast.
• Provides immediate feedback during development without manual testing overhead.

Tradeoffs

• Automated tools only catch 30-40% of accessibility issues, requiring manual testing.
• Adds time to test suite execution and CI/CD pipelines.
• May produce false positives that require developer judgment to resolve.
• Requires team training on WCAG standards and how to fix violations.
• Manual screen reader testing is still necessary for complex interactions.