Accessibility Testing

Most teams find out their product has accessibility problems the hard way. A user complaint,  a support ticket that doesn’t quite make sense, or worse, a legal notice.

The thing is, most of those problems could have been caught before the product ever went live. That’s what accessibility testing is for.

This guide explains what it is, who needs it, how to actually do it, and what tends to go wrong when teams skip it or rush it.

What Is Accessibility Testing?

Accessibility testing is the process of verifying that your product works for people with disabilities, and it covers a far broader range of users than most teams expect. 

This includes people with visual impairments who rely on screen readers, those who navigate entirely by keyboard rather than a mouse, people with learning difficulties who need clear and simple instructions, and those with hearing impairments who depend on subtitles to follow video content.

The question accessibility testing tries to answer is: “Can these users actually get things done in your product?” Not just load the page,  but complete a form, make a payment, manage their account, and get help when something goes wrong.

When asked about accessibility testing in software testing, the answer is that it is a planned part of Quality Assurance (QA) work. It helps identify whether our products meet established accessibility standards, providing details on the code, design, content, and user journey combined. It is not just a one-time audit.

If you’re not sure where your product currently stands, ux testing services can help you determine where it stands and give you a clear picture of what needs fixing.

Accessibility Testing vs Usability Testing

People mix these up a lot. Usability testing is about how easy a product is to use, for anyone, while on the flip side, accessibility testing is specifically about whether people with disabilities can use it at all.

They overlap, though; a form that’s well-labelled is both easier to use and more accessible. Good error messages help everyone. But a product can sail through usability testing and still completely fail a user who relies on a screen reader. You need both.

Accessibility Testing vs Automated Testing

Automated tools can scan your pages and catch a decent number of issues, such as missing image descriptions, buttons with no label, and text that’s too low contrast. They’re fast and worth running.

But they can't actually use your product. They can't tell if a screen reader reads your website pages in a logical order, or whether keyboard focus is stuck on a menu item, or if the error messages you provide confuse a person with no sight of the field being referred to. It requires a human to do that!

Why Accessibility Testing Matters

Let’s start with the obvious one. Around one in six people worldwide lives with some kind of disability. That’s not a small edge case; that’s a significant chunk of your users. If your product doesn’t work for them, they just leave. Or they can’t complete the thing they came to do.

From a business perspective, that has a direct impact on conversion. For iGaming platforms and FinTech products, a user who can’t complete a deposit or navigate account settings is a lost transaction. Multiply that across the share of your user base with accessibility needs, and it adds up.

There’s also a legal side to this that a lot of teams underestimate. The European Accessibility Act requires many digital products to meet accessibility standards. The UK Equality Act places obligations on service providers. 

These are not vague guidelines; ignoring them can lead to serious consequences for all businesses. If your product is available to customers in European countries and you have not thought about complying with data protection laws, we recommend finding out more.

The SEO Connection

This one surprises people. Accessible products tend to rank better in search, and the reason is pretty logical: the things that make a page accessible also make it easier for search engines to understand. 

Clear heading structure, descriptive image text, meaningful link labels, clean code. You’re not doing extra work; you’re doing the same work once and getting two benefits out of it.

There’s a brand angle too. A product that works for everyone says something about how your company operates. That matters to users, and it’s starting to matter more to enterprise clients and procurement teams who have their own accessibility requirements to meet.

Who Needs Accessibility Testing?

Anyone with a product that people use. But some industries feel the pressure more than others.

Website owners and SaaS companies are the obvious starting point. If the public can access your product, it should work for everyone in that public. iGaming platforms have a specific challenge here: players need to deposit, withdraw, manage bonuses, navigate live game interfaces, and get support, all of which can hit barriers if the product hasn’t been tested properly.

Government and educational websites are subject to strict legal requirements. However, product teams, UX designers, and web developers across all sectors need to pay attention to accessibility, as accessibility barriers can arise during the design and development stages. By the time a website or platform reaches the testing phase, creating digital accessibility can be expensive.

Content publishers have their own piece to own too. Heading structure, link text, image descriptions, readable formatting,  that’s all content-layer accessibility, and it’s often overlooked when the development team ticks their boxes and moves on.

Types of Accessibility Testing

There’s no single method that does the whole job. Most teams that get this right use a combination, depending on where they are in the build and what kind of product they’re testing.

Automated Accessibility Testing

Automated accessibility testing tools scan web pages and highlight any problems that can be detected. Missing alternative text, low contrast, blank buttons, unlabeled form fields, and ARIA errors. These tools are quick, reliable, and provide a good starting point.

The catch is that they only catch a fraction of what’s actually there; roughly a third of real accessibility issues show up in an automated scan. The rest you won’t find until someone actually tries to use the product.

Manual Accessibility Testing

This is where you find the things automation misses. You test keyboard-only navigation. You zoom to 200 and 400 percent and check nothing breaks. You walk through the product with a screen reader and check that everything gets announced correctly.

You check form labels, focus order, error messages, and modal dialogs. You try to get through a full user journey,  login, deposit, and account management,  without touching a mouse. That’s how you find the focus traps, the broken tab order, the error messages that don’t actually explain what went wrong.

Assistive Technology Testing

This means testing with the accessibility tools that individuals use - screen readers such as NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver, screen magnification software, speech control software, and switches. Each of them behaves differently. Although a web page appears perfectly good on Google Chrome, it is completely inaccessible via JAWS. Unless you test it out

User Testing with People with Disabilities

This is probably the most valuable type of user accessibility testing, and the one most teams skip because it takes more effort to set up. But there’s a simple reason it’s worth doing: people who use assistive technology every day find problems that no tool and no internal tester will catch. 

They’re not testing for issues; they’re just trying to use your product, and they notice immediately when something doesn’t work.

Even a handful of sessions with users across different needs will surface patterns quickly. The findings are specific and hard to argue with.

Key Standards and Guidelines to Know

WCAG is the main one. It stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it’s published by the W3C. When someone asks whether a product is accessible, the answer is almost always measured against WCAG. It’s referenced in legislation across Europe, the UK, and the US, which is why it’s the standard most teams work toward.

The guidelines are built around four ideas, known as POUR: 

• Perceivable — Can users access all the information, regardless of how they perceive things? 

• Operable —  Can they actually use the controls and navigation? 

• Understandable —  Does the content and the interface make sense? 

• Robust —  Does the code hold up well enough to work with different assistive technologies?

WCAG has three levels: A, AA, and AAA. Level A is the floor,  the bare minimum. Level AA is what most organisations aim for and what most laws reference. Level AAA is the highest level, and in practice, most products can’t hit it everywhere. For iGaming and FinTech products across European markets, AA is the realistic and expected target.

What Wcag Compliance Really Means in Practice

Passing a WCAG audit doesn’t mean you’re done. It means your product met the standard at a point in time. New features, content changes, third-party integrations,  any of these can introduce new problems.

Real compliance means testing full user journeys, not just individual pages. It means checking behavior across different screen readers and browsers. It means verifying that everything works together: the code, the content, the interactions. A product can pass an automated scan and still fail a keyboard user at checkout. That’s not compliance.

How to Perform Accessibility Testing Step by Step

If you’ve never done this properly before, it can feel like a lot. It doesn’t have to be. Here’s a sequence that works.

1. Define Scope and Priority Pages

Start with the pages and flows that matter most. Homepage, navigation, login, registration, forms, product pages, checkout, account management, support. For iGaming platforms, deposit and withdrawal flows are the highest priority; a barrier there is a direct revenue and compliance issue. Prioritise those first.

2. Run Automated Accessibility Scans

Use a tool to scan all your priority pages and export the results. This gives you a starting list of issues to work through. It won’t catch everything, but it catches the obvious stuff quickly, so you’re not starting from nothing when manual testing begins.

3. Test Keyboard Navigation

Put the mouse away. Navigate the entire product using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Escape, and arrow keys. Check that the tab order makes sense, that focus is visible at all times, that menus open and close correctly, and that every control can be reached and used. Try to complete a full transaction from start to finish without touching the mouse once.

Focus traps,  where you get stuck inside a component and can’t escape,  are one of the most common and frustrating barriers for keyboard users. No scanner will find these for you.

4. Test with Screen Readers

Use at least two combinations: NVDA with Firefox and JAWS with Chrome to cover most Windows users. VoiceOver on Safari covers Apple devices. Work through each priority page and check headings, landmarks, links, button labels, form labels, error messages, and reading order.

Pay extra attention to anything dynamic,  notifications, live scores, and error messages that appear after a form submission. If it updates without a page reload, check whether screen readers actually announce it.

5. Review colour contrast and visual presentation

Check that text meets the minimum contrast ratios: 4.5:1 for regular text, 3:1 for large text. Test your layouts at 200 percent and 400 percent zoom and make sure nothing disappears or breaks. Check that colour isn’t being used as the only way to communicate information; red for errors is fine, but only if there’s also a label or icon.

6. Validate Forms and Error Handling

Every input needs a visible label that’s properly linked to the field in the code. Instructions should be there before a user starts, not just after they make a mistake. When something goes wrong, the error message needs to explain what the problem is and how to fix it,  and it needs to be announced by screen readers, not just displayed on screen.

7. Document Issues and Retest Fixes

Log every issue with the affected page, what WCAG criterion it relates to, how severe it is, who it affects, and what the fix should be. Pass it to the team in a format that’s easy to act on.

Then retest. This part gets skipped more than it should. A fix that looks right in the browser can still behave incorrectly with a screen reader or under keyboard navigation. Close every issue properly before marking it done.

Common Accessibility Issues Found During Testing

A few problems come up in almost every product that hasn’t had dedicated testing for accessibility. Worth knowing what to look for.

Missing Text Alternatives and Poor Semantic Structure

Images without descriptions, decorative images that get read out unnecessarily, headings that skip levels or repeat, buttons with no label, links that say "click here" and nothing else. These issues tend to cluster together in products where accessibility wasn’t considered early in the design process.

The good news is they’re usually quick to fix once you find them.

Keyboard and Focus Problems

Focus traps. Dropdown menus that only work with a mouse. Focus indicators that someone removed from the CSS without replacing them. Tab orders that don’t follow the visual layout. Modal dialogs don’t return focus to where they came from when they close.

These issues are invisible to automated tools and easy to miss in internal reviews. They only show up when someone actually tries to navigate without a mouse.

Forms, Media, and Contrast Issues

Unlabelled fields. Validation errors that only use colour to communicate the problem. Required fields that aren’t announced as required. Videos without captions. Audio content with no transcript. Text that doesn’t meet contrast thresholds. On iGaming and FinTech platforms, these problems show up most often in checkout and verification flows, usually because the design was built around aesthetics rather than accessibility.

Best Accessibility Testing Tools

The right tools depend on what you’re trying to do. Here are the most useful ones across different parts of the testing process.

Browser and Developer Tools

Lighthouse is built into Chrome DevTools and gives you a quick score along with flagged issues linked to WCAG criteria. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s a good first pass. The accessibility tree view in Chrome and Firefox shows you how assistive technologies see your page structure, which is useful when you’re trying to understand why a screen reader is behaving in a certain way.

Dedicated Accessibility Testing Tools

Axe DevTools is the most widely used tool in this space, available as a browser extension and as an API you can plug into your CI pipeline. WAVE from WebAIM overlays issues directly on the page, which makes it easier to explain problems to designers and stakeholders.

Accessibility Insights from Microsoft adds guided manual testing on top of its automated checks, which is genuinely useful. For screen reader testing specifically, NVDA is free on Windows; JAWS is the professional standard; VoiceOver is built into every Apple device.

Why Tools Alone Are Not Enough

Even the best tools only find a portion of what’s actually there. The issues that matter most to real users, broken keyboard flows, confusing screen reader announcements, and inaccessible error handling require a human to find. Tools are a starting point, not a finish line.

Accessibility Testing Best Practices

The teams that do this well don’t treat accessibility as a separate audit that happens at the end. They built it in from the start.

Test early. An inaccessible interaction pattern caught in a design prototype takes minutes to address. The same issue caught after it’s been built into a shared component library takes much longer. The earlier it gets into the conversation, the less it costs.

Make it part of regular QA, not a separate workstream. When accessibility checks sit alongside functional testing in the same sprint, they don’t get cut when things get busy. Test with real content, not placeholder text,  dummy copy hides heading structure problems, and won’t show you how your actual brand colours perform in contrast.

Focus on the journeys that matter most. You don’t have to fix everything at once. Start with the flows where a barrier has the biggest impact: login, deposit, account management, and checkout. Then expand coverage over time as it becomes part of the team's way of working.

Test repeatedly. A product that was accessible at launch can have that broken by a single deployment. New features, content updates, third-party widgets,  all of it needs to be checked.

Include disabled users where you can. Internal teams get better at spotting issues, but they’ll never replicate the experience of someone who uses a screen reader every day of their life. Even occasional sessions with real users from disability communities produce findings that nothing else will surface.

Train everyone, not just developers. Writers create a heading structure. Designers make contrast decisions. Developers write the code. Accessibility problems come from all three, and fixing them requires all three to understand their role in it.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Most accessibility programmes run into the same problems. These are the ones worth watching for.

• Relying only on automated tools. A clean automated report does not mean the product is accessible. It means the detectable issues are gone. The undetectable ones may still be there.

• Treating it as a one-time audit. A report at launch tells you where things stood that day. After the next release, it’s out of date.

• Ignoring mobile. A lot of users in iGaming and FinTech access products only on their phones. Touch targets, gestures, and screen reader behaviour on iOS and Android all need separate testing.

• Fixing the code but not the content. Developers can resolve every flagged code issue while content editors keep publishing pages with broken heading structure and images without descriptions.

• Vague link text. "Click here" or "read more" tells a screen reader nothing. Every link should make sense on its own, out of context.

• Skipping retests after updates. Fixes need to be verified. New features need to be tested. Treating accessibility as done is how it quietly breaks again.

Conclusion

Accessibility testing isn’t just about ticking a compliance box. It’s about making sure the thing you built actually works for the people using it,  all of them, not just the ones who happen to use a mouse and have good eyesight.

For iGaming and FinTech teams building across European markets, getting this right has real consequences: for conversion, for legal compliance, and for the users on the other side of the screen. If you’re not sure where your product stands right now, user experience testing services can help you work through it properly.

Got a specific question or want to talk through your situation? Get in touch, and we’ll help you figure out the right place to start.