Quality assurance testing is a crucial step in building and launching a website. It ensures an experience that is accessible, intuitive, and functional. It requires great attention to detail and can be time-consuming depending on the complexity of the website.

However, QA testing doesn’t end once a website is launched â it’s an ongoing process that should continue as website content is updated. Although this process can become quite tedious, there are plenty of tools out there that can help automate and streamline the process. Here are a few of my favorite QA tools at the moment.

Quality assurance testing sometimes requires a lot of back-and-forth between designers, developers, and QA folks. Trello is a web-based task management tool that we use to keep feedback and ideas organized all in one place. It follows the Kanban method, which is a workflow management method designed to help visualize work to be done. The basic idea is that you create a board designated to a specific project, fill the board with lists (think to-do lists), and then you create “cards” within those lists that represent the work that needs to be done. You can then drag the cards to the relevant list.

My favorite thing about Trello is that it can be used for all types of projects. I highly recommend it for anyone who needs a little bit of help staying organized.

The Siteimprove Accessibility checker is a free Chrome extension I use for nearly every website I test. All I have to do is click the Siteimprove icon in my browser (I prefer Google Chrome) and it will scan the entire page to identify any potential accessibility concerns.

Here’s an example of the accessibility checker in action:

 You can filter results by the level of WCAG 2.0 conformance.

This is my go-to tool when I’m tasked with scanning websites for broken links. It’s super easy to use. You enter the URL of the website you’re scanning, adjust the settings to your preference, and hit the Scan Now button. Within minutes, the tool scans every page on a website for broken links, mixed content, and more.

The only downside is that the newest version (v9 4.4) isn’t free like previous versions. However, I’d say it’s worth the money considering all of the features it includes.

Any other tools we should know about? Let us know!

Quality Assurance is a critical step in creating and delivering work that works as planned and works well for your audience or users. 

At VIA, quality assurance entails the basics such as proofreading, but also highly technical cross-browser and cross-device testing and accessibility testing.

Our Quality Assurance team is deeply invested in your audience and users, getting to know their capabilities, needs, desires, usage patterns and preferred method of interface.

Quality Assurance

My (Current) Favorite QA Tools

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 are a series of guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for making web content more accessible on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Following these guidelines helps ensure content is more accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities, such as blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, and photosensitivity. The guidelines often improve usability for general users as well.

There are a lot of guidelines and they can be hard to understand for those of us who aren’t developers (such as myself) but here are a few of the basics –

Provide text alternatives for non-text content (photos, videos, etc.)

Ensure that there is enough difference between background and text color

Provide user controls for pausing, stopping, or hiding content

Use clear page titles, headings, and labels

Keyboard accessibility for users without a mouse


It’s important to note that there are multiple levels of conformance to the guidelines.

Level A â basic web accessibility features

Level AA â deals with the most common barriers for disabled users

Level AAA â the highest (and most complex) level of web accessibility

Of course, level AAA is ideal. However, some of the highest level guidelines can’t be applied to all websites and therefore level AA is the next best target.

Here at VIA Studio, we have a set of tools and checklists that we use for every web project to ensure that these guidelines are met and that the websites we build are as accessible as possible. It’s important to us that users with disabilities have equal access and equal opportunity while accessing the web.

To see a full list of WCAG 2.1, check out 

https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

Accessibility is a broad concept, but it's best described as providing a quality, functional experience to as much of an audience as possible. At VIA Studio, we consider usability from the very first moment of any projects. In practical terms, this means deep understanding of our assumed audience, followed by user-focused design, WCAG- and ADA-compliant frontend development and finally detailed accessibility-minded quality assurance.

Alexandra Ponce

Journal Entries

My (Current) Favorite QA Tools

A Brief Overview of WCAG 2.1