“Automated Checker Friendliness”: How To Maximize Efficiency In Your Automated Accessibility Testing

You might have been in a situation where you know that your web page passes WCAG, but the automated checker that you’re using tells you that it doesn’t. This is a “false positive” and it’s very time-consuming. The opposite situation also happens: where you know that your page fails WCAG, but your page is coded in a way such that your automated checker has no way of checking it. This is a “false negative”, and it’s time-consuming in a different way. In both situations, you have unfortunately lost out on the extreme time efficiencies that an automated checker can give you. There are ways of building websites which “play nice” with automated checkers, and ways that don’t. What you want is to build your website with maximum “Automated Checker Friendliness”: these are ways of building your site so that you get the most coverage out of your automated checker. This talk will show you general principles and specific examples of good and bad “Automated Checker Friendliness”, one WCAG success criterion at a time.