Digital Accessibility & its Importance
In today's digital age, accessibility is paramount. Digital accessibility ensures inclusivity, allowing individuals with visual, auditory, physical, or cognitive impairments to navigate and interact with websites and applications without barriers.
More than 1 billion people (16% of the global population) worldwide have significant disabilities, making the impact of digital accessibility monumental. Furthermore, initiatives like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) together contribute to spreading awareness and creating an inclusive online experience for everyone.
Importance of accessibility to businesses
Businesses have realized the significance of accessibility and the impact it has on their brand reputation, user satisfaction, and legal compliance. With increasing awareness and regulations surrounding accessibility, there is a need to prioritize accessibility testing as an integral part of their development process. Incorporating it early in the development process can help businesses save time and resources by avoiding costly retrofits or redesigns later.
By embracing accessibility, businesses contribute to creating a more accessible and inclusive world, fostering social progress and leaving a positive impact on individuals' lives.
Problems with existing tools and solutions
Existing solutions are labor-intensive and prone to error, making accessibility testing inefficient and time-consuming. Based on our user interactions, we’ve learnt that businesses often struggle with:
- Slow test workflows: Most automated scanners require users to test each web page separately, making the process extremely laborious as the size of the website grows.
- Juggling multiple tools: Current tools in the market do not facilitate catching basic as well as complex issues using a single platform, thereby forcing businesses to depend on multiple tools.
- Lack of accessibility expertise: Accessibility testing requires expertise, particularly when identifying advanced accessibility issues. Being a relatively new area, there is a shortage of quality talent available with the necessary skills and experience.
Introducing BrowserStack Accessibility Testing
At BrowserStack, we firmly believe that accessibility is non-negotiable. We take immense pride in our unwavering commitment to make testing unequivocally accessible to all, and enabling businesses to create digital products that cater to all users.
Today, on the occasion of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we are thrilled to announce that BrowserStack Accessibility Testing is in Beta - a super app designed to cater all your manual accessibility testing needs, while simplifying accessibility testing for your digital products.
BrowserStack Accessibility Testing’s comprehensive range of features makes it possible to catch all kinds of accessibility issues, basic or complex, at speed and with ease.
BrowserStack Accessibility Testing’s features
Catch all types of accessibility issues
- Workflow scanner: Find issues across multiple webpages in a single automatic scan as you navigate through your user workflow.
- Assisted Tests For Complex Issues: Identify complex issues with ease using the semi-automated scanner, typically found by accessibility experts.
- Screen Reader on Real Devices: Access a range of Screen Reader enabled real devices in a single click, across Mac, Windows & Android.
Accelerate accessibility test workflows
- Single Scan Issue Identification: Run only a single scan to identify issues across your user workflow.
- Auto De-duplication: Avoid manual de-duping as the scanner automatically removes any duplicates.
- Intelligent Clustering: See issues that are the largest offenders up front, as all unique issues are grouped by the component they affect.
Generate reports in minutes, not days
- Instant Reporting: Auto-generate a shareable report of unique issues after every test run.
- Smart WCAG Mapping: Save hours of manual effort as all reported issues are auto-mapped to the violated WCAG guideline.
- Central Reporting Dashboard: Access reports from all test runs on the dashboard, and effortlessly consolidate them within seconds. Also view smart summaries of issues grouped by affected components, violated WCAG guideline etc.
Monitor accessibility to always stay in the know
- Quick Status Check: Use the Website scanner to generate an accessibility report for 100s of URLs at once, making accessibility monitoring a hassle-free possibility.
- Schedule Scans: Schedule daily or weekly recurring scans so that you can keep a pulse of your website’s accessibility with ease.
With its powerful array of features, BrowserStack Accessibility Testing makes manual web accessibility testing effortlessly seamless, empowering you to prioritize the accessibility of your digital products with ease. Embrace BrowserStack Accessibility Testing and join us in shaping a future where digital experiences know no boundaries.
See BrowserStack Accessibility Testing in action!
Join our product experts for an exclusive webinar, “Introducing BrowserStack Accessibility Testing: Your accessibility super app” on 30th May 2023 and learn how you can leverage the super app to effortlessly test, report, and monitor your web accessibility.
