Summary: Evaluate the accessibility of your product using a number of methods and tests including GAR, AGUA, and automated tools. This is your opportunity to find and fix bugs.
Overview
Accessibility testing involves evaluating Google's products, tools, and features using a number of methods. This ensures people with disabilities can use them and that they meet accessibility standards. This phase is also your opportunity to fix any accessibility bugs you uncover.
Find in-depth guidance and resources for testing at the Accessibility Testing site.
Visit go/accessibility-testing
Guidelines for testing
Learn more about each of these methods on the Testing Methods resource.
- Automated testing: checks for specific implementation-level accessibility issues primarily intended for developers; can be run continuously during development to prevent accessibility issues and reduce manual effort and bug fixes during accessibility evaluation; cannot substitute for manual testing or accessibility evaluations
- Manual testing: checks for broader behavioral accessibility issues; is significantly more time- and cost-intensive than automated testing; required for accessibility evaluations (e.g. GAR)
For mobile and mobile web, both automated and manual testing can be conducted on physical devices or virtual simulators. Simulators may be quicker to test some accessibility issues on, but they are not as thorough as testing on physical devices. Testing on simulators should always be in addition and not in lieu of testing on physical devices.
The Accessibility testing site provides guidance for the following:
- Testing configurations
- Documentation tools
- Reporting bugs
- Machine learning fairness
- Working with vendors
- Testing requests
Learn about testing guidelines
Accessibility Trusted Testers
The Trusted Testers (go/a11y-tt) are here to help you understand how real accessibility users interact with and perceive your product or feature. There are several ways to engage the Trusted Tester and the types of feedback you can receive include survey work, open-ended qualitative feedback, video recordings of product usage, informational interviews, or beta testing with in-product feedback submissions.
Visit process overview to learn more
Testing for assistive technology
Many assistive technologies come pre-installed on users' devices. Usually, they can use platform-specific APIs to interpret content in your product, without any extra action by the developer. Designers and developers should work together to test and ensure the assistive technology can access the content and translate the message.
The Assistive technology overview page has resources and information you need to make sure your product works with ATs. Here you will find out more information about testing for screen readers, switch controls, braille support, magnification, and voice control.
Visit go/accessibility-testing
Accessibility Scanner
Accessibility Scanner is a tool that scans an app’s user interface to provide recommendations on how to improve accessibility of the app. Accessibility Scanner enables anyone, not just developers, to help identify a range of common accessibility improvements; for example, enlarging small touch targets, increasing contrast for text and images and providing content descriptions for unlabelled graphical elements. View these instructions for running Scanner on iOS for non-developers.
Find Accessibility Scanner in the Google Play store
Web Accessibility Tools
The go/web-a11y-tools guide provides a high-level overview of tools recommended for development and testing within Google. There is a range of tools to help validate the accessibility within applications.