Automating Keyboard Accessibility Testing

Date & Time

Thursday, March 21, 2024 - 1:20 PM PDT  

Location

Platinum 4 (AMAZON)  

Description

In this talk, Amazon Worldwide Stores accessibility experts discuss techniques to automate evaluating keyboard accessibility. These techniques can improve results and save time. The presenters will provide an overview of keyboard accessibility concerns and why they have been historically difficult to automate. Techniques will be presented that utilize image analysis, simulated user input, and our knowledge of web page structure to automate what is normally a manual, repetitive process. Using a headless web browser running in AWS Lambda, it is possible to automate the traversal of the page, inspecting each focusable element to ensure that it has a visible focus indicator and that the visible focus indicator meets color contrast requirements. We will also discuss how, as long as we are traversing the page, we can look for potential keyboard traps and ensure that the keyboard focus order logically follows the visual focus order. The presenters will describe the techniques involved and also the edge cases that make this kind of testing difficult. We will discuss some of our solutions to these edge cases and where we still have work to improve the techniques by using AI and Machine Learning.  

Audience

Research & Development

Audience Level

Intermediate  

Session Summary (Abstract)

Amazon Accessibility experts will provide an overview of keyboard accessibility concerns and why they have been historically difficult to automate with proposed techniques for automation.  

Primary Topic

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)  

Secondary Topics

• Digital Accessibility
• Engineering
• Web

 

Session Type

General Track  

Presenters

• Aaron Schneider
  Amazon
• Godwin
  Amazon - Worldwide Stores A11y

Add to Outlook/iCal (How it works)

Back to Session List