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.
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!
It sounds like you're already performing some pretty good manual accessibility testing against your web application, which no automated testing tool is going to be able to replicate completely. That said, if you're looking to take care of any low-hanging fruit with an automated solution, like Kimberly suggested, there are several automated accessibility testing tools out there that you can relatively easily integrate into your existing web application's testing framework that might help you.
One such tool is Continuum, which doesn't have a C#-based library offering at the moment, but could be used in a separate testing framework to be run against your web application after it has already been built. This may be preferable depending on your use case, as code linters for accessibility aren't perfect and are highly language-dependent, whereas testing the HTML of your web application more closely matches the screen reader use case you say you're trying to test for. You could even integrate Continuum into your existing CI/CD process to make sure your application is tested during development as opposed to afterwards, to reduce your manual accessibility testing load.
Continuum has a few sample projects to get you started, depending on your technologies of choice. Free versions are available at webaccessibility.com if you're interested. Most of them are Java- or JavaScript-based at the moment.
Appreciate this is quite an old question, but having explored this area a lot recently thought was worth updating with the state as of 2023 as there is now some progress in this space.
Current tooling available at time of writing (that I’m aware of, may not be exhaustive):
guidepup - NodeJS automation for VoiceOver and NVDA supporting all keyboard commands and getters for spoken phrases (disclaimer: I’m the author).
auto-vo - CLI for navigating sequentially through a page with VoiceOver and reporting the spoken phrases, also exports a separate Node module for some interactions with VoiceOver.
screen-reader-reader - NodeJS automation for VoiceOver and NVDA for starting, stopping, and getting spoken phrases.
web-test-runner-voiceover - NodeJS plugins for #web/test-runner to automate VoiceOver testing.
nvda-testing-driver - .NET automation for NVDA supporting all keyboard commands and getters for spoken phrases.
assistive-webdriver - NodeJS implementation of a Webdriver server that allows remote testing of screen readers (e.g. NVDA, JAWS) running in a VM.
As stated in other answers, there are also a number of static analysis tools such as axe, as well numerous browser extensions offering similar static analysis, and companies such as Assistiv Labs offering remote environment services to interact with screen readers manually (similar to SauceLabs/BrowserStack/etc. but for screen readers, magnification etc. - no affiliation and haven’t used services so can’t vouch, simply an observation).
Worth calling out that none of these cover the full range of a11y requirements - there is more to a11y than just screen readers. A combined/layer approach including automation, manual testing, and user testing likely preferred.
Related
I am new to the Testing Arena. I am working with a very heavy ExtJs application.
And I am looking for the best testing tool.
I came across a bunch of tools, but can't seem to make a decision.
1) Siesta 2) Jasmine 3) Riatest
I want to be able to deploy these tests easily on a CI server.
Siesta and Jasmine can both be used with PhantomJs to automate the tests, but which one is better and easy to use?
As long as I can generate various clicks correctly and capture output, I'm cool.
Any help is appreciated.
Our company is moving from a Java based client to an ExtJS web and mobile application. We use QTP/UFT for Java automation which is slow, buggy, expensive, and cannot get passed the DOM easily so I started investigating Siesta recently. It seems like a viable option in my book but I admit I haven't checked out the other applications.
The initial setup with Siesta took longer than expected but with its event recorder, it makes it a gratifying transition. The recorder still requires debugging. I'm in QA and know how to script using Python, Bash, etc but it's definitely a learning curve to transition from VBScript to ExtJs/Siesta JavaScript. They have an open source version and a free 45 day trial to check out.
I've read about HTML Robot and SmartBear. Here's a post on the Sencha forums that talks about different automation software. Sencha also plans to release some kind of automation involving SenchaCmd during SenchaCon 2015 this April 7 to 9.
You should take a tool which covers your needs and improve the software quality.
Jasmine is good for unit tests without much gui interaction, you should use this to test your domain logic (e.g. stores, models, ...). Jasmine can run on every environment, a simple server with nodejs runtime is enought.
For regression tests the choice is yours. What tool you are comfortable with? Choosing a tool is one part, using it is another. Riatest seems like a windows application, are you able to run this on your CI server?
Evaluate them with your dev team and then make a choice for the long run.
Is there any Tool Available in the market to test the localized mobile apps under different locales.
Like, the Typical Tests performed on localized mobile apps will be ..
1)Application functionality - For basic navigation
2)String Truncation Validation
3)Validate the translated Symbols and Images must be appropriate to the Target Language
and so on ..
Please provide me your valuable information on this ..
Really thankful to you..
I have some experience using Robotium to automate the localization testing of our mobile applications.
The main thing you want to look for in any automation solution for localized applications on any platform, is the ability to uniquely identify each object you will need to interact with (buttons etc.), using an identifier that will not change on different locales. That way, your automation code will run on any locale (we would not want to have a different code base per locale).
In my experience, it's much quicker to develop a Robotium (Java based) solution for automated testing of Android applications (other solutions such as SeeTest exist, but I have not found it great).
QTP I've found to be very useful for desktop applications, but not mobile. Selenium is good for automating web applications, and you can use Selenium Mobile to interact with the browser on a mobile device if you need to.
I blogged recently detailing how we use Robotium to test our Android application, and my experiences using it, you can find this at the link below.
Automate your Android App Testing Using Robotium
When testing your application on the devices and networks that it’s intended for, carrying out user acceptance testing in the target market could highlight any market-specific concerns and return some very useful market specific feedback. Consider a beta (test stage) program, customer early-adopter program or work with a company like ICanLocalize who use only translators that translate into their native tongue.
If, for example, your global mobile app implements its own pop-up touchscreen keyboard, you should consider the needs of your international users to ensure that they can enter text in their native script. While mobile devices and smart phones are being shipped with increasingly higher screen resolutions, usability and aesthetics need to be considered too. Translated text can often expand by as much as 25 percent, affecting the layout and visual appeal of your app. Some scripts may be very difficult to read if the displayed font size is not sufficiently large.
There are more things to consider when localizing an application and I’m not talking about plain old translation of code here. Any company hoping to win over an international audience can make this job significantly easier by planning ahead for the translation process:
Think carefully about words used to describe menus.
Get a native-language linguist to test your application
Avoid colloquialisms
Consider navigation.
http://www.icanlocalize.com/site/2012/10/planning-ahead-for-translation-when-developing-a-mobile-app/
Hi I have a Swing application to test and I found Sikuli a nice tool to do it, but I am a little worried about the size of the community and if it's being continually developed and it's being used by other companies.
Do you use it?
For what?
Is it stable?
Is it the best tool for the job you needed?
I use it in my company, too.
It can be used quite easily for not too complex gui-tests.
Sikuli was not developed for the last year but development is now increasing again.
Questions in the Sikuli-FAQ section on launchpad are answered fast although the community is not that big.
In my company, Sikuli is used for gui testing which was previously done by human testers.
It saves some time but not everything is automatable with Sikuli, e.g. the OCR functionality is not dependable (but will be updated from tesseract 2.04 to 3 in the near future).
For my job it was the best tool because it is the only open source (=free) tool I found that provides screenshot based automation that can be integrated with other systems like CI-systems and is programmable with Java and Python which makes easy unit testing possible with JUnit or PyUnit.
Hope I could help.
Yes we use it in-house for testing. It is actively supported. I have reported bugs in Sikuli and have had tickets and workarounds suggested within days with the bugs fixed in the next revision.
It is quite stable. The problems I have encountered typically come from not specifying images correctly and the program selecting an incorrect area of the screen.
One of our more unique uses was creating a set of automated bench tests for a legacy embedded system. The system was written in assembly and had no unit testing capabilities. It communicated with a custom legacy PC application. Rather than try to locate the PC source code, reverse engineer the design, and then write some meaningful bench tests, we created a number of Sikuli scripts to interface with the PC app. It saved weeks of development.
Yes, we use it for automating GUI tests. It's used mostly for old systems that were developed with no test driven back end. (ie: no testing api)
We tests some very complex tools including a debugger using Sikuli.
We tend not to use the Sikuli IDE though.
Just new on software testing...
Regarding testing, I think GUI applications are pretty difficult to automate. Some testing involves with interacting particular GUI objects in particular sequence (e.g., clicking buttons). The interface often changes from one window to another. And the timing and sync sometimes also pose an issue (e.g., recording mouse clicks and replaying may screw up).
Is there any solution for testing such applications with less human labour? Thank you for sharing your experience.
Yes, GUI apps are indeed tough to automate. Regardless of the app's technology (Swing, web, WPF, iOS), you first have to focus on automating high-value tests. Moreover, test automation shouldn't be at just the GUI level, it should be a mix across unit, integration, and functional (GUI) tests too.
Are you working on a web app? If so, have a look at great open source tools like Watir or WebDriver. (I'll also pitch Telerik's Test Studio to you; however, for full disclosure I'm their evangelist for that tool.)
Desktop applications (or mobile) bring a lot of challenges to automation, and it's totally dependent on what platform you're working with. Test Studio supports WPF, but you can also look to other commercial and a few free tools. I don't know of any tools for Swing apps, but that lack of knowledge is due to me having been out of that domain for many years. (And maybe I'm so out of it that Swing's not even the normal Java GUI toolset...)
iOS and Android are tough ones to find reliable automation tools for. I know the Frank framework/API will work on iOS (Test Studio has a free recorder in the App Store), but I don't know of any other tools that reliably support the extraordinary matrix of Droid hardware and OS versions.
Regardless of your platform and toolset, you need to learn the basic approaches for dealing with GUI testing: focus on high value tests, learn to avoid duplication through approaches like Page Object Pattern, learn how to deal with synchronization/timing issues in your specific application.
It's a long haul, but if you work carefully it's totally worth it.
(And fun, too, IMO.)
What tools are useful for automating clicking through a windows form application? Is this even useful? I see the testers at my company doing this a great deal and it seems like a waste of time.
Check out https://github.com/TestStack/White and http://nunitforms.sourceforge.net/. We've used the White project with success.
Though they're mostly targeted at automating administration tasks or shortcuts for users, Autohotkey and AutoIT let you automate nearly anything you want as far as mouse/keyboard interaction.
Some of the mouse stuff can get tricky when the only way to really tell it what you want to click is an X,Y coordinate, but for automating entirely arbitrary tasks on a Windows machine, it does the trick.
Like I said, they're not necessarily intended for testing purposes, so they're not instrumented for unit test conventions. However, I use them all of the time to automate stuff that isn't testing related.
You can do it programmatically via the Microsoft UI Automation API. There's an MSDN Magazine article about it.
Integrates well with unit test frameworks. A better option than the coordinate-based script runners because you don't have to rewrite scripts when layouts change.
There's a couple out there. They all hook into the windows API to log item clicks, and then reproduce them to test.
We're now mostly web based (using WatiN), but we used to use Mercury Quicktest.
Don't use Quicktest, it's awful for a tremendously long list of reasons.
This is what i was looking for.
Check out http://www.codeplex.com/white and http://nunitforms.sourceforge.net/. We've used the White project with success.