The best feature of an automated testing tool is also its worst: The ability to go through large amounts of code and find errors that don’t require a human to find. Using an automated tool you should be able to test hundreds of pages in a matter of minutes. Finding the average number of pages per site is difficult. Some old data suggests that the average number of pages is 273, whereas some newer data says the average site has many times more. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume you test 200 pages. Tenon finds an average of 51 errors per page. This means that if you scan 200 pages with an average of 51 errors per page, Tenon will find 10,200 errors. Holy cow!
There’s just no denying it: that sort of issue count is demotivating, to say the least. The prospect of having over 10,000 issues to fix on your site is likely to result in none of them getting fixed or in the fixes being seriously delayed.
Tenon’s goal isn’t to find issues, but rather to improve your site’s accessibility
Finding issues is easy. Fundamentally there are only 16 unique types of test. No matter how many tests you have, each accessibility test is an iteration of one of those 16 types. After finding the issues, the next step is to begin fixing them. This is where progress tends to stop, because determining what to fix first becomes difficult to determine. In a normal QA scenario, where a system action fails or the UI isn’t rendering properly, prioritizing things becomes pretty easy. Accessibility is a bit less easy to prioritize for a lay person.
How Tenon helps priority
Tenon’s test response provides two interesting metrics: “Certainty” and “Priority” for each issue in the results set. “Certainty” is an indication of how certain the tool is that it has found a legitimate issue. While we try to avoid the dreaded “false positive” anyway we also realize that in some cases there are things we’d like to test for that may have a higher risk of generating a false positive. We transparently disclose this by giving each result a “Certainty” – in other words, how certain we are that the issue is legitimate. “Priority” is based on a weighting scale I created based on a number of factors such as ease & speed of repair, impact on the interface, impact on the user, etc. Utilizing the priority score, organizations can mitigate risk quickly by ensuring that they tackle the easiest, fastest, and most important issues first. We find that this is especially well-suited for Kanban approaches to remediation. Development managers can simply rank the issues based on Priority and tackle them in order.
For more information, read Understanding Issue Reports In Tenon.Io API Response