Today, we have released Spark-Ruby v2021.1.3 and Spark-JS v2021.1.5 specifically to provide Test Evolve users a powerful accessibility testing feature.

There is an ever increasing industry focus on web accessibility, especially within the e-commerce and retail sectors. There are year-on-year increases in web accessibility lawsuits and retailers typically account for over 70% of such cases.

So what is web accessibility?

The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.

Web accessibility means that websites, tools and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.

Accessibility is essential for developers and organisations wishing to create high-quality websites and web tools, whilst not excluding people from using their products and services.

- source: https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/

Our Spark releases today, provide a direct integration with Deque's powerful Axe accessibility testing engine. This is the same engine behind Google's Lighthouse tool and is widely considered to be the industry leader.

Testers can expect their automated accessibility tests to check for around 50-60% of documented accessibility violations, across multiple standards. A supplementary manual testing approach is required for full standards coverage.

When testing with this engine, you will record very few false errors. The violations presented in the new Spark Accessibility Report will warrant attention from your developers.

Adding Accessibility checks to your current tests

In much the same way as our visual testing feature, you can now very easily add accessibility checks to your existing automated tests.

The default_config within your Spark project will include a new accessibility_testing.yml file with a switch to turn your checks on or off.

In any test, for any page of the web application that you wish to assess, simply add TE.accessibility_check('label_of_your_choice') and at the end of your test run, a new accessibility_test.html report will be found in the results directory of the Spark project.

The report will provide full violation detail including recorded instances and severities, descriptions, source code at fault and links with instructions on how to correct it.

For a full guide - please visit our accessibility testing documentation.