How accessibility programs benefit from both manual and automated testing

When your team is under pressure to move quickly, and you know you need to test for accessibility, automated testing can feel like the most efficient approach. In practice, however, accessibility testing requires both automated and manual testing. They serve different purposes, and both are necessary to determine whether an experience is truly accessible, usable, and conformant. The good news is, you can include manual testing and still maintain your velocity.In this post, we’ll examine the complementary benefits of automated and manual testing and outline a testing approach that supports development speed while continuing to deliver more accessible user experiences.

Many teams begin improving their accessibility workflows by incorporating automated checks throughout their development lifecycle, using tools like Axe DevTools for Web to help identify common issues earlier in the process and reduce later rework.

By running accessibility checks locally, in pull requests and continuous integration pipelines, you can catch common issues early, when changes are easiest to fix. Over time, you’ll reduce the number of accessibility violations that can reach production or appear during audits. Using automation throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) shifts accessibility from a last-minute concern to a proactive and preventative practice that supports continuous development.