Testing ASP.NET Web Applications

9.11. Applying Accessibility Testing to the ASP.NET Family

This chapter has spent a great deal of time talking about the techniques and tools to make web applications accessible, now it's time to put this new found knowledge into practice.

9.11.1. WebForms and ASP.NET MVC Applications

The methodology used for testing both WebForms and ASP.NET MVC applications is the same. We are going to use the WROX Pizza store demo web application example to illustrate the steps for finding accessibility issues.

9.11.1.1. Initial Look

The very first thing you should do is take a peek under the hood of the web application and see how the HTML is being rendered. No fancy tools are needed for this step, it's just a matter of using the built-in functionality of the web browser to view the source. Figure 9-41 is simply using the View Source option within Firefox.

During the initial look at the source you start to see how much work will be required to make the site accessible. The very first line of the source is a line to pay close attention to. In Figure 9-44 the first line indicates that this document should adhere to the XHML 1.0 Strict guideline. While looking though the remainder of the source, you should make sure that the document follows this HTML compliance standard; if it doesn't then automated tools will fail because the document is not XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, as the first line indicated. Visual Studio will produce warnings to try to help developers adhere to the document type set ...