TL;DR: Accessibility is a crucial aspect of web development that ensures everyone, regardless of their abilities, can access and use your website. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a standard for web accessibility, and adhering to them is not only ethically important but also increasingly becoming a legal requirement.
One valuable tool for checking WCAG compliance is Google Lighthouse. It can help identify accessibility issues during development. And when integrated into your test automation project with tools like Neodymium, it can significantly streamline your accessibility testing and monitoring process.
What is WCAG and Why is it Important?
WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are a set of standards developed to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. These guidelines cover a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments. By following WCAG, you ensure that your website is usable by a larger audience. Approximately 15% of the world’s population has some form of disability.
WCAG compliance is also gaining traction legally, with governments in the US and EU enforcing accessibility standards. Non-compliance can lead to lawsuits and of course to less revenue and visitors.
The Role of Test Automation
Automating WCAG checks using tools like Lighthouse can help find and fix accessibility flaws early in the development cycle, saving time and resources. It also reduces the burden on manual testers by automatically generating accessibility reports.
Most importantly, test automation maintains the achieved level of accessibility of the application through regression testing.
If you have an existing or planned test automation project, it is crucial to incorporate WCAG compliance into your testing strategy. This is why we have integrated Lighthouse into Neodymium, allowing you to easily extend your test cases with accessibility checks.
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