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Explanation of accessibility testing
This page provides an explanation of Scottish Book Trust's approach to accessibility testing for this website.
Scottish Book Trust use Silktide, a quality assurance platform, to regularly scan and monitor the entire website for accessibility issues. This allows us to identify new issues between annual testing and better manage accessibility on an ongoing basis. For our annual audits, we use the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM(this link will open in a new window)) as a guide for defining the scope of our internal testing.
We tested the Scottish Book Trust site against WCAG Version 2.1, conformance target AA.
We selected a representative sample of web content from the public website of Scottish Book Trust located at https://www.scottishbooktrust.com(this link will open in a new window). This sample includes a minimum of one sample page from all main page types to test the website's full site functionality and range of content.
The page types selected for the testing sample are:
- Homepage
- Sign in
- Dashboard
- Standard page
- Landing page
- Bookbug landing page
- Topic
- Article
- View all articles by
- Meet the team
- Learning resource
- Song and rhyme library
- Song and rhyme
- Authors Live on Demand library
- Authors Live individual page
- Competition
- Opportunities for writers
- Browse and search
- Donate
- Newsletter sign up
- Book list
- Live Literature Author Directory
- Live Literature Author Directory profile
- Application form
- Quiz
- Custom form
Initially, we used Silktide, our quality assurance tool, to run automated checks of the pages selected for testing. Silktide checks pages against the WCAG 2.1 criteria, including A, AA and AAA conformance targets.
Some examples of automated checks carried out by Silktide include but are not limited to:
- Ensure controls change appearance when they are selected
- Insufficient colour contrast
- Missing alternative descriptions on images
- Form field labels
Silktide also provides guidance on recommended assisted checks, or manual tests. This is because monitoring platforms like Silktide can only find some accessibility issues, and human review is still necessary.
Therefore, the selected pages were also checked using manual testing to ensure common issues related to automatic check errors were identified. For example:
- Ensure functionality is available to keyboard users
- Check if text should be marked as a heading
- Use of colour for meaning
- Relevant alternative descriptions on images, e.g. correctly defining images as decorative
- Ensure users can pause or hide animated content
Additionally, the representative sample of pages was also tested using screen reader technology. The screen reader and browser combinations used were NDVA and Firefox, Voiceover and Safari, and TalkBack and Chrome for Android. Screen reader testing was conducted using these combinations on both desktop and mobile devices.