Automate accessibility testing with NVDA screen reader

Question

I am working on implementing accessibility (for visually impaired individuals) for one of our web application. It need to be ARIA compliant. Right now we are testing our changes with screen reader manually. For example we have Tree control in our application. I open NVDA screen reader and then navigate through my Tree Nodes. NVDA screen reader speaks out

• Node XYZ expanded, (When I expand XYZ node with right arrow key)

• Node XYZ collapsed, (When I collapse XYZ node with left arrow key)

Along with the voice it also write down this text.

But all this is manual. Now we want to setup automated test cases for the same so that any regression bugs can be caught by are test cases. Do there exist any such tool which we can use to automate our test cases. Any direction will be helpful.

PS: Just for a sake of comparison. We have nunit to write test cases for c# application. After writing test cases we integrate them into our build process. Any breaking change is caught when we run the build. I am looking for something similar to test out our aria compliance and screen reader's behavior with our web application.

Answer 1

I don't know of any existing tools for testing screen readers, however, there are accessibility APIs that test websites and web applications.

axe-core from Deque Systems is widely used and well-supported.

I wrote a python package to run automated web accessibility tests that uses axe-core and selenium.

While it isn't quite what you are looking for, it does cover about 60% of accessibility guidelines, including aria roles and attributes. It should help with determining screen reader usability.

You could integrate axe into C#, similar to my python package and the Java package, also created by Deque.

I hope this helps!