How to test early

Testing early can help you discover issues before they impact users. Learn how to test accessibility before a product or feature goes live.

A man with black hair and beard and brown skin.

Rohan Bhatia,
Platform Support Lead

“Catching accessibility issues before a product or feature ships is an important way to ensure your organization is prioritizing accessibility, reducing remediation costs and protecting your brand reputation. Once you’ve completed your manual and automated testing, leverage testing with native assistive technology users as a final validation to ship features with confidence.”

Fable’s guide to inclusive design and product development

Prototypes

Fable Engage makes it easy to engage with testers to perform Prototype Reviews using all of the most popular prototyping tools, like Figma and Adobe XD.  A Prototype Review can help you identify accessibility concerns in the design phase.

When reviewing a prototype, you can include the link to the prototype in the live links field when you create a request or share your screen over Zoom and review the prototype that way, depending on your security needs.  Both approaches work well for screen magnification and alternative navigation users.

Please note you can’t test prototypes using unmoderated request types.

Learn more: 5 tips for conducting a Prototype Review

Web-based products

HTTP Basic Authentication is an easy way to control access to specific web content without using cookies, session identifiers, or login pages. It uses fields in the HTTP header to provide a username and password.

Learn about HTTP Basic Authentication from MDN

To test using HTTP Basic Authentication:

  1. Set up HTTP Basic Authentication on a publicly accessible environment (for example, a staging or UAT environment).
  2. Provide the username and password in the Special Instructions field when creating Engage requests.

Feature flags are used in software development to turn features on or off for certain users without modifying the source code. Feature flags are typically used in a production environment. To test using feature flags:

  1. Configure feature flags to enable pre-production features for specific test account(s).
  2. Make sure that the test account(s) are correctly set up by logging in yourself to try the feature before creating an Engage request.
  3. Provide the log in credentials for the test account(s) in the Special Instructions field when creating an Engage request.
  4. If an email address is needed to log in, Fable can create shared email addresses that testers can use and share those addresses with you to add to the request.

Native mobile applications

We’ve had success with Apple TestFlight and Microsoft App Center for providing access to beta / pre-production apps for our Testers to install.

In the case of TestFlight, you will need to provide an invite link in the environment to allow our testers to install the beta app you would like to test.  You can find more information on the process of creating an invite link on this page from Apple, under the heading “using public links to invite testers.”

Similarly, if testing an app via App Center, testers can access the release through a direct link.  Learn more about how to Release a Build using App Center. App Center supports package distribution for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and custom operating system apps.

You can also test Android apps using apk files. Android Packages with the file extension apk are used by Android-based operating systems for distribution and installation of mobile apps. When including a link to an apk file in an Engage request, make sure it is a public link and doesn’t require signing up through third-party websites.

What about VPN?

A VPN solution would need to fully support video and audio sharing, be easy to use, available across all platforms in multiple countries, accessible with every assistive technology we support, while preserving the security and privacy of our testers and customers.

Currently, there is no VPN solution on the market that meets Fable’s accessibility, security, and quality requirements.  This means that unfortunately we are unable to test products that are only available behind a VPN. Consider using one of the techniques outlined above instead.

If you have questions about how to set up a testing environment using any of the above approaches please reach out to support@makeitfable.com.