Effective and accurate web accessibility testing requires both manual and automated testing. Pope Tech simplifies this by bringing both automated and manual testing together in one platform with the AIM Score.
Developed by WebAIM, the AIM Score takes into account an automated and manual testing score to give you a more reliable metric for measuring your website’s accessibility.
Since manual accessibility testing can take a lot of time and be intimidating to start as a beginner, Pope Tech has also simplified this with the AIM Score Wizard. After completing the manual testing, you can use the report to start improving your website’s accessibility.
The AIM score’s manual testing doesn’t test all WCAG success criteria, but it does have 10 prioritized tests that help find the most common and impactful issues.
A more reliable accessibility metric
Including both automated and manual testing makes a more reliable measurement because you get two different types of page samples.
The first sample is testing all your websites’ pages with automated testing. This finds any programmatically detectable issues on every page of your website. Most organizations can’t manually test every single page on their websites, but they can run regular automated tests.
While the automated testing sample does include every page, it doesn’t include every accessibility issue or the impact of the issues. This is where manual testing comes in.
The next sample with manual testing is a smaller four-page sample so organizations can regularly complete it. It’s a deeper dive into those pages to find issues automated testing can’t detect. Human testers can also gauge the impact of those issues.
Since the AIM Score includes both automated and manual testing, you get the breadth that comes with automated and the understanding that comes with manual. Your AIM score then becomes a reliable way to measure your organization’s accessibility.
Add manual testing to your accessibility strategy
You might think I already do automated testing – do I really need manual testing? The answer is automated and manual testing work best together.
Manual testing brings the necessary human-testing component to find issues automated testing doesn’t detect. For example, images have alternative text but the majority aren’t written correctly; focus indicators aren’t displaying on the page; form labels aren’t announced properly; and the impact of errors you know and don’t know about isn’t considered.
While the AIM score manual test is not a complete manual audit of possible accessibility issues, it does test for some of the most common and impactful issues. The Manual Accessibility Impact Score gives a meaningful measure of how these issues impact users with disabilities.
Often, the issues found on the small four-page sample represent issues throughout the website. These manual testing results can then be used to inform improvements that affect the entire website.
The AIM score is a realistic way to improve your accessibility strategy by combining manual testing with automated testing.
Make a more accessible website based on your AIM score findings
Each AIM Score comes with your most common issues, beginner-level documentation on each problem, and notes from the manual accessibility tester on the four tested pages.
Your most common issues are the perfect place to start improving your website’s accessibility. The accompanying documentation helps your org fix issues, plan training, or can be sent to specific contributors as a quick way to up-level your team on accessibility.
You’ll proactively improve your website’s accessibility as more people get familiar with guidelines through easy-to-follow documentation or focused accessibility efforts following the AIM Score.
How you’ll get your AIM Score
Your AIM Score is the average of two different scores:
- Automated Accessibility Score
- Manual Testing Impact Score
Pope Tech automatically generates the Automated Accessibility Score based on your website’s data. The Automated Accessibility Score is a comparison of your website to the top million websites.
To generate the Manual Testing Impact Score, you’ll either:
- Complete the manual test for at least four of your webpages with the help of the AIM Score Assistant. There is help content on each step explaining how to test the strategy and score it.
- Have Pope Tech complete the AIM Score manual test for you. Professional plan users can send us the four pages they want to be tested. Then, accessibility experts manually test those for pages.
The AIM Score manual test process is:
- Give each of the four pages a score from 1-10 for 10 different accessibility strategies.
- Give each page an overall accessibility score.
Pope Tech then combines the Automated Accessibility Score and Manual Testing Impact Score to give you your AIM Score. We’ll then provide support materials to help you improve your website. Read How the AIM Score is generated for a detailed example.