LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome Extension: How to Ensure Inclusive Web Experiences?

The World Health Organization (WHO) mentions that 1 in 6 people have disabilities, and they are an inclusive part of the vibrant community that uses the Internet globally. This number can be as high as 75% in countries like America. 

Such statistics make us believe that if so many people have trouble navigating through a website, many more developers and testers would have made their web applications compatible. Unfortunately, this is not the case. 96% of the top 1 million web pages still had accessibility issues in 2023. However, things are changing for good. 

Today, people with disabilities take responsibility for filing lawsuits against websites that are not accessible (including the infamous Dominos case). This shift has made developers and testers move towards accessibility, which usually means modifying their existing pages according to WCAG accessibility principles. 

Whatever the cases be, LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension can prove to be a game changer in this process reducing the time of debugging and modification for accessibility issues and bringing quality to the web application. 

But how do we achieve that? Let’s understand the problem first.

What is Web Accessibility?

The Internet was built to remove the communication barrier between everyone. Anyone can communicate with anyone without any discrimination. This includes people with disabilities of all kinds, including sight, hearing, neurological, speech, or physical. However, the definition of web accessibility goes beyond disability.

Accessibility is not just being “accessible” to people with disability but also to people of various ages and groups and those viewing the web in different conditions. For instance, someone walking on a bright sunny day, someone walking in a location with poor network reception, or someone who is a senior citizen should be able to access and preferably have the same experience navigating through the website.

Is Web Accessibility That Important?

The short answer to this question is “Yes, extremely important.” There are many reasons to support this argument:

• Accessibility is a human right: Access to the web and the Internet is a basic human right declared by the United Nations Convention and a fundamental right in many countries protected by law.

• Provides equal opportunities: If your website is web accessible, there is always a feeling of providing equal opportunities to everyone regardless of their condition. This becomes even more important when we see that 21% of undergraduate students have reported disabilities. 

• Widens the audience: A web-accessible website will have a broader audience, eventually reflected in revenue numbers.

• Provides enhanced user experience: Since the website is web-accessible, the user can navigate through it in various conditions, enhancing the user experience and bringing user satisfaction.

• Promotes social inclusion: A web-accessible website is socially significant as it can reach people in underprivileged areas, including rural areas of a country where a significant portion of the people cannot read English.

• Generates higher revenue: Talking purely on economic grounds, a web-accessible website will have the potential to cater to a larger audience than a website that is not accessible. This will eventually generate higher revenue and build trust among the audience so they return frequently.

The summary of the importance of a web-accessible website reflects on social responsibilities and the provision of equal opportunities to all. If our website can be a medium for that, our small contribution can also help others in the transformation.

Ensuring Web Accessibility With LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome Extension

Considering the importance of web accessibility and facilitating its inclusion in applications, many tools have made their way on the internet, ready to be installed and contributing to the process. 

One such endeavor has been the LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension, a tool for accessibility testing on Chrome that can be downloaded and added to Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Google Chrome. The main motive of this extension is to evaluate the website for accessibility issues and point them out to the developers and testers for quick resolution. 

LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension can be downloaded from the Chrome Store and boasts the following features:

• Full page scan: The Chrome extension can scan the entire page and detect accessibility issues.

• Partial page scan: A full page scan may not always be required. For such scenarios, the testers can select the area on the page to initiate a partial scan instead. 

• Multi-page scan: An advanced version of a full-page scan is a multi-page scan where multiple pages can be fed to the extensions, and a collective report can be fetched for all of them, pointing out their accessibility issues.

• Workflow scans: The workflow scan will check the accessibility issues across the user actions and page redirections.

• Integrated dashboard: The extension provides an integrated dashboard into the LambdaTest platform where all issues can be reported, tracked, and analyzed in a single place.
• Enhances quality and user satisfaction: When used in web app development and testing, LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension enhances the website’s quality and user satisfaction with an accessible and inclusive website.

• Free to use: The extension is free for everyone, so no small business, individual developer, or enterprise should lose the opportunity to make an inclusive and accessible website.

Naturally, having all these features attached to the browser where the website will eventually run will give confidence to the developers before their release and help their already published website to be converted to an accessible one quickly.

How to Use LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome Extension?

LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension can be downloaded similarly to other extensions. To do this, follow the below steps:

1. Visit the Chrome Webstore page where the extension is hosted. 

2. Next, select Add to Chrome on the page.

This will add the extension to the browser. This step will be similar in other Chromium browsers, such as Brave.

3. Select Add extension in the prompt.

Once the extension is downloaded, installed, and added to the browser, you will be notified by the prompt:

The installation can also be confirmed by navigating through the Extensions on the browsers and finding the tool in the list of installed extensions. 

LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension works in the Web Inspector section. Therefore, the developer or the tester must navigate to the web inspector panel by right-clicking->Inspect after opening the website. For this demonstration, we are using the Wikipedia website, as it is most commonly used throughout the globe.

On Wikipedia, open any page. For instance, here is the link to John Dalton’s page. 

4. Right-click on this page and select inspect.

5. Select Accessibility DevTools from the top navigation list.

6. Dock the toolbar to the bottom for the best experience, if not already. The extension’s main page will appear at the bottom in full view:

7. Login to your LambdaTest account using the Login button. Once done, click Full Page Scan to scan the complete page for accessibility issues. The results will appear soon after the scan:

The result shows 182 issues on the page, out of which 12 are critical. The right screen also displays the issues listed with a summary. For instance, the first issue is “Images must have alternate text 12,” meaning that 12 images do not have alternate texts. This issue is critical as images must have alternate texts per WCAG guidelines. 

8. Click on the issue to find its detailed summary:

The right section also shows the How to fix section, which will chalk out the steps to fix the issue:

This would be of extreme help as the developers need not navigate or Google out the resolution of the issue, but they can quickly fix it to make the page accessible.

What we did here is considered a test execution. Naturally, a tester will scan a page in multiple ways multiple times in a single sitting. Later on, they will want to analyze their execution patterns, results, and the progress they made in the accessibility journey. For this, LambdaTest saves all the test executions in your account, which you or your teammates can view at any point in the future.

Returning to the extension’s home screen, you will notice that the Login button has changed to Dashboard here. 

9. Click on the Dashboard, and the tests conducted in the previous section will be visible on the platform:

These tests will be automatically saved to your account without any explicit action being taken. Hence, they will be seen when we click Saved Tests from the extension’s home screen. 

Notice the three options are available at the right end of each test denoting three options:

• Share the tests with other team members.
• Download the test as CSV, PDF, or JSON, which can be input to other tools.
• More options to Rename or Delete the tests.

As one can see, the LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension provides a complete solution to the tester. Testers must select one option; a single click can perform all the actions.

Tips To Create a Web-Accessible Website

While everything LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension points out should be corrected for web accessibility, we should also do our part and eliminate such issues in the development phase. For this, there are a few tips to consider:

• Alt text: The alternate text attached to images helps screen readers easily assess the image reference and read it to the users facing challenges.

• Contrasting colors: Color theory plays a big part in web design. One of the elements that hurts web accessibility the most is using contrasting colors, which makes it harder to focus on a single element, especially those that are either out in the sun or have visual challenges. 

• Ambiguous link text: A lot of the websites use ambiguous link texts like “click here”, “this link”, “the link”, etc. While it may not challenge a normal user, it will confuse a visually challenged person when the screen reader reads “this link” without context.

• Making use of correct typography: The typography of the web app includes using a normal-sized font that is readable by all the users and a font type that does not confuse the letters among themselves. It enhances readability for people with disabilities as well as normal users.

• Make use of text with images: A web page with just images will not be of much use to someone who faces challenges in viewing the images. Reading out alt text will also not make much sense in this case. Hence, a web developer should use images and text to serve their audience.

• Transcript in audio/video: For the same reasons described above, it is also important that audio/video files are not challenging to people with visual and auditory challenges. A transcript will help them understand the file much better.

• Perform cross-browser testing: To reach out to the audience working on multiple devices, it is important to conduct browser testing and ensure that the website is presented as intended on all devices.

If these tips are followed, we can significantly improve the critical issues post-production and reduce the additional work we would have to do later.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is not an optional element of a website. While some countries have it protected under law, it is a matter of social responsibility and providing an inclusive environment to everyone for which the internet was originally invented. Any person with any disability should be able to operate and navigate the website easily. However, the list of accessibility checkpoints is large, so developers and testers often need a helping hand to point out these issues. Thankfully, LambdaTest has developed one such free tool to do this task with a single click.

LambdaTest Accessibility DevTools Chrome extension is a Chromium-based browser that can scan the complete page and list accessibility issues within a minute. It also provides an option to scan multiple pages and workflows for a complete scrutiny of the application. These tests can be saved and analyzed later on a single dashboard screen. Such tools are a blessing for developers, testers, and people who face various challenges across the web. Using such tools helps social upliftment, and until the rules become stricter, we can be happy that we have been doing our part for a long time.

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