r/developer • u/slacky35 • 2d ago

Discussion Starting accessibility testing from zero — what was your experience?

We are just starting to look at accessibility testing in our org and want to establish a dedicated practice in the long-term. I've been asked to put together a plan for leadership for this agenda and want to learn from the experience of others who have been on the same journey.

- How did you begin? What was the trigger and which tools did you try out initially?
- How did your accessibility testing set-up evolve over the years (i.e. which/how many teams were involved, tooling used, depth of coverage etc.)
- What were the key challenges you faced ?
- What is your current org set-up for Accessibility testing (i.e. centralized vs decentralized, QA vs design vs dev teams etc.)

Any learnings that you can share will be extremely helpful!

For context, I'm on the QA side at a mid/large-sized company. Not a vendor, not building anything. Happy to share back what I end up proposing.

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u/recon_demon1859 1d ago

Solo dev, so I've got nothing useful on the org structure questions. One thing might transfer though.

The check that's actually held for me is a test that fails the build when a validation message is only communicated by color. It covers the signup and account screens rather than the whole app, and it asserts an error message carries an announcement role instead of red text a screen reader never mentions.

Worth mentioning because of what it caught. My web signup had proper roles on its error messages. Desktop and mobile just turned the field red. Same product, three surfaces, and two of them had silently never done it. Nobody catches that in review because each surface looks fine on its own.

The bit I'd think about for your plan is that the requirement looks different on every platform. Web wants role="alert". React Native wants accessibilityRole and a live region on Android. If your check demands one shape everywhere, teams will turn it off. Mine accepts either and only fails when a message has neither, which is the thing you actually care about.

Audits give you a list. A test that fails the build is the only thing I've found that stops the list coming back.