Live Blogging at #testbash Same approach, Different location

Hello everyone and welcome to #testbash San Francisco.


As many of you are familiar, one of the things I actively do when I attend conferences is that I live Blog the sessions I attend. I am doing/have done this at #testbash but instead of those posts appearing on TESTHEAD, they are posted at Ministry of Testing's forum "The Club", specifically in the TestBash San Francisco section.

Please stop by and have a read or several, as there's plenty of posts there :).

• Live Blog - Influence > Authority and Other Principles of Leadership
• Live Blog - Power of Models
• Live Blog - How to Test Serverless Cloud Applications
• Live Blog - Creating a Culture of Quality Assurance
• Live Blog - Extra! Extra! Automation Declared Software
• Live Blog - Climbing to the Top of the Mobile Testing Pyramid
• Live Blog - Tester at the Table and the Tester in My Head
• Live Blog - Going Undercover in the Mob

Give 'em the aXe: 30 Days of Accessibility Testing

The Ministry of Testing has declared that May should be "30 Days of Accessibility Testing". As in the days of yore when I used to take on these challenges and blog regularly, I'm in the mood to get back to doing that. Therefore, I am looking to write a post every day around this topic and as a way to address each line of their checklist.

Today, let's look at #3.

3. Share your favorite Accessibility tool.

I'm not sure if this counts as my favorite, but it's one I'm using quite a bit right now, and that's practically the same thing.

As I posted yesterday, WAVE is a popular Accessibility checking tool, but it looks at only one page at a time, and in a different window. When exploring Accessibility issues, I prefer to deal with the page right then and there, using something like Chrome Developer Tools or the other flavors of application out there that serve similar purposes.

If you use Chrome and like using Developer tools, then Deque Systems Chrome extension "aXe" may be right up your alley.

So let's see it in action. How about we repeat the test we did yesterday with WAVE on http://mkltesthead.com?

We see that the error regarding image alt tags (several of them in fact) is still an issue, and we can highlight one of the images aXe is complaining about. 

Great, so what can we do from here? We can test out a change using Developer Tools, and indeed a rescan shows that adding an alt tag drops our count of image tag issues. That change will only be good for that current session, but it does allow us to directly see the changes we apply and the effect they have. It also acts as a prompt for things we can directly modify for the image in Blogger, too. To do the latter, all you have to do is:

• Edit the page.
• Select the image.
• Click on "Properties".
• Fill in the title text and alt text as desired.
• Click Save.

If you display the page again and rescan, you'll see the count for images without alt tags drops by one.

So what was noteworthy about that? I could do it in the same window and then recheck it after the edit and see that it was updated. Of course, this is something that in a site where all of the files are local, you can just do a regex search and identify which images don't have alt tags. Blogger doesn't give me that option up front, so this is a nice way to check for Accessibility conformance, debug in the app view, and make changes as I go. 

Not bad for a free app. Not bad at all :).

Wading into WAVE: 30 Days of Accessibility Testing

The Ministry of Testing has declared that May should be "30 Days of Accessibility Testing". As in the days of yore when I used to take on these challenges and blog regularly, I'm in the mood to get back to doing that. Therefore, I am looking to write a post every day around this topic and as a way to address each line of their checklist. Today, let's look at #2.

2. Use a tool like WAVE to scan a page for Accessibility problems.

Almost everyone that starts with Accessibility testing at some point early in their learning comes across WAVE. There are lots of good reasons why. First, it's a standalone page. Second, it's simple to get started. Just go to the site, put in the URL and Submit.

Ahh, but that's just the beginning :).

Let's try an experiment. How about we choose a page that's relevant to me? Heck, why not this blog? What would happen if I did a scan for http://mkltesthead.com/?

Looks like the answer is "there are a lot of issues" with my blog as it relates to Accessibility.

Let's start with the most obvious. 

• It looks like most of the images being displayed do not have "alt" tags.
• The language of the page is not identified.
• Form elements are not labeled (the search bar is my guess)
• Lots of redundant links. This is a blog, so that may well be unavoidable, but it's still worth looking at. In this case, the redundant links are the tags I use for each post. Repetitive? Yes. Necessary? Arguably, yes.
• Contrast is low (I admit, I like the layout of my site, but it's a good bet that for color blind individuals it may well be hard to read).

I hear you all. You are thinking "OK, that's great, but so what?" Well, now I have a clearer idea of elements about my site design that I might want to change. Some I will have a hard time changing as they are part of the Blogger platform and templates, but many I can change since there are elements of the template that I can modify directly.

Redesigning my blog is not part of today's challenge, but just by doing this little bit, I'm seeing areas that I can directly control and changes I can personally make that can enhance or better the user's experience as Accessibility is concerned.

Updated: After I originally wrote this, I took a look at the contrast issues and determined where I could make a few changes. Just by picking a brighter yellow over a burnt orange for prominent text, and changing footer text from gray to white, I was able to eliminate 300+ contrast errors. Yay me :)!!!

Curious to see how your site or other sites stack up? Go ahead, have a look. WAVE makes it easy :).

Making May 30 Days of Accessibility Testing

I love it when something comes my way that literally forces me to rethink and reconsider something I already care a lot about and like to believe I'm somewhat skilled in already. With thanks to the Ministry of Testing, I have decided that I will do all I can to get into the spirit and actively blog about their current challenge, 30 Days of Accessibility Testing.

If you follow the link above, there is a checklist, and that checklist just begs to be blogged about. Therefore I'm committing to doing exactly that. It's already May 2, so I'm a day behind. That means you'll be getting two posts from me today.

Let's start with entry 1.

1. Learn about the Diversity of Disabilities and the effects of aging.

I've written about this several times on this blog, but to keep with the spirit of the challenge, let's venture into something new. I came across "Defining Disability Diversity in Society" and I think it's worth a read.

The point of the original task is to consider the variety of disabilities, of which there are many.

• Visual disabilities ranging from mild to total blindness 
• Auditory disabilities ranging from mild to total deafness
• Physical disabilities ranging from mild discomfort in joints to complete immobility or absence of limbs
• Cognitive disabilities that likewise run across a spectrum from mild to severe
• Learning disabilities
• Emotional disabilities

There are even situational disabilities. It's easy to think that there are two classes of people; those who are normative, and those who are not. Yet there are situations that can, in an instant, turn someone from normative to disabled. They may be temporary (loud settings, darkness, foreign countries, etc.) or they may become permanent (injury and age being common forerunners).

I'm currently experiencing one example of a disability entirely related to my age. I'm no longer able to read anything comfortably without reading glasses. If I forget them, doing anything that requires me to read or type is compromised. At those times, I find myself looking at the options available in Accessibility tools. Not to test but just to cope with the situation.

I actually had this situation happen Sunday night. I went to a meeting for my daughter's upcoming camp counselor training, and I forgot my readers. I was next to useless when it came to reading anything close. Stuff that was written on the whiteboard I was OK with but that was across the room and large enough so I could see it clearly.

Truth be told, I didn't really think much about visual accessibility other than as a set of tools I'd need to know to test with until I turned 45. As a special birthday present, I was given a gift of near-sightedness (or where you struggle to see things close up, I always get the terms confused). In any event, that change in my daily reality took me from being an involved participant in Accessibility discussions to being committed to working on their behalf.

Chances are, you will have a similar opportunity to come to grips with this and other age-related ailments. Normativity is relative, and it's a moving target. At some point, all of us will fall outside of it and realize that we are part of a large community of "non-normative users" (there, that's a term for you just in case the term "disabled" bothers you).

Methinks this will be a very productive month :). Stay tuned.