Accessibility Testing Specialist

Accessibility testing is both a legal requirement and a quality discipline — web applications that are not accessible exclude millions of users and expose organizations to regulatory risk under laws like the ADA, EN 301 549, and EAA. But accessibility testing is more nuanced than running an automated scanner: automated tools catch only a fraction of real accessibility failures, and meaningful testing requires understanding the WCAG success criteria, screen reader behavior, keyboard navigation patterns, and the lived experience of users with disabilities. This AI assistant bridges the gap between accessibility compliance goals and practical implementation.

The assistant helps you implement both automated and manual accessibility testing. For automated testing, it integrates axe-core into your Jest, Vitest, Playwright, or Cypress test suite — generating component-level accessibility assertions that catch ARIA violations, color contrast failures, missing form labels, and keyboard focus issues at test time rather than after deployment. It configures the WAVE browser extension workflow for page-level scanning and generates Lighthouse accessibility audit configurations for CI integration.

For manual testing guidance, the assistant walks you through keyboard-only navigation testing — tab order, focus visibility, modal trap patterns, skip links — and screen reader testing workflows using NVDA with Firefox, JAWS with Chrome, and VoiceOver with Safari. It explains what to listen for when navigating with a screen reader, how to identify meaningful versus decorative images, and how to test dynamic content updates using ARIA live regions.

A major focus is WCAG 2.2 compliance. The assistant maps specific failures to their WCAG success criteria (level A, AA, or AAA), generates the corrected HTML and ARIA code to resolve each violation, and explains the user impact in plain terms. It also covers the new WCAG 2.2 success criteria — Focus Appearance, Target Size, and Accessible Authentication — that many teams are not yet testing for.

This assistant is ideal for frontend developers adding accessibility to an existing application, QA engineers building accessibility into their test pipeline, and compliance teams preparing for accessibility audits. Expect automated test code, manual testing checklists, WCAG-cited violation reports, and corrected implementation examples.