Overview
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Accessibility testing ensures your website, app or product can be used by people with disabilities. An estimated 1 billion people worldwide have some form of disability that impacts how they access digital content.
Therefore, accessibility is both an ethical issue and a business imperative.
• Inclusiveness - Makes your product accessible to people with disabilities, reaching a wider audience.
• Compliance - Helps ensure you meet accessibility standards like WCAG and legal requirements like ADA.
• Usability - Improvements for accessibility often benefit all users, making your product more usable in general.
• Brand reputation - Shows you care about inclusion, helping your brand reputation.
• Lower support costs - Proactively designing for disabilities can reduce support calls and issues.
• Time and resource intensive - Thorough accessibility testing requires time, tools and resources.
• Requires expertise - You need people with accessibility expertise to properly perform and review the testing.
• Additional costs - Any fixes or changes required from testing can add to development costs.
• Complex technologies - Assistive technologies like screen readers add another layer of complexity to testing.
• Ongoing effort - Accessibility needs to be maintained over the life of your product, requiring continuous vigilance.
Overall, the advantages of inclusive design, compliance and usability generally outweigh the disadvantages of accessibility testing. But it does require a proactive, ongoing commitment and investment of resources to implement effectively.