Hi, everyone.
My name is Gerard K.
Cohen, and welcome to my course Accessibility: Testing and Screen Reader use.
I'm a passionate front‑end engineer and a frequent speaker at web
and accessibility conferences around the country.
By day, I'm a Lead Accessibility Strategist at one of the nation's largest banks,
and I lead a team of accessibility professionals in architecting and
engineering accessible components as part of a UI Library used by
over 80 different commercial applications.
Testing for accessibility is a big part of what I do every day,
either directly testing or working with people that test for accessibility.
Testing for accessibility should be embedded into your daily workflow,
and in this course you'll learn to test websites for accessibility.
First,
you'll explore simple techniques to test for the
most common accessibility issues.
Next,
you'll discover tools that you can build into your daily
workflow to prevent introducing new issues.
Finally,
you'll learn how to test using assistive technologies like screen readers.
Some of the major topics that we'll cover include testing for
various input modalities like keyboard,
touch, and voice; doing static code analysis like HTML validation and
inspecting source code in the browser; and finally, testing with screen
readers like NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver on Mac OS and iOS,
while learning the truth about screen reader myths.
When you're finished with this course,
you will have the skills and knowledge of testing techniques needed to ensure
your websites are inclusive and accessible to disabled people,
as well as the various points in your daily workflow to build in
testing. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar
with the basic web platform of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,
as well as front‑end tooling like linters and unit tests.
Of course, knowledge of the web accessibility guidelines is a major plus.
I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn accessibility
testing and screen reader use at Pluralsight.