A while ago, eBay announced that it entered a partnership with the National Federation of the Blind to provide visually impaired Americans with new entrepreneurial opportunities – you might have caught the interview with Jonas Klink, Sr. Product Manager of Accessibility for eBay, posted on the eBay Ink blog.
Web site accessibility and usability are the basis upon which such opportunities can be built. It must be possible for users to search, browse, buy, bid and sell using the keyboard alone, as well as use assistive technologies such as screen access software.
However, as Julian Harty, Tester at Large across eBay “with a passion for making technology adapt and support people, rather than the other way around”, points out in his just published article on ACM Queue, “many organizations don’t do any usability or accessibility testing at all; often it’s seen as too expensive, too specialized, or something to address after testing all the “functionality” (which is seldom completed because of time and other resource constraints). For these organizations, good test automation can help in several ways.”
Read the full article about “Finding Usability Bugs with Automated Tests” at http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1925091.