Third-party testing

Third-party testing brings an independent perspective to assess the accessibility of your digital product or service. This helps teams identify potential gaps and areas for improvement that may not be obvious to people already working on the project. It helps products become more accessible and can also help offer the possibility of obtaining valuable conformance certifications.

Benefits of third-party testing

• Suppliers offer a detailed and unbiased test of your product, free from preconceived notions.
• These experts specialise in accessibility, bringing valuable experience to identify potential issues that might be overlooked.
• Using specialised tools, suppliers conduct comprehensive tests to ensure your product is accessible to a diverse range of users.
• When an external supplier gives your product the green light, it enhances its credibility in the market.
• Approval from an external supplier signals your commitment to making products easy for all users.
• Third-party certification builds trust with users, assuring them that your products meet required standards and that you are committed to ensuring that your products can be used by everyone.

Understand your requirements

Before you start searching for a supplier to conduct an audit, you’ll need to understand which elements of your product or service you want the audit to focus on. Learn more about testing to get a better understanding of the testing process.

There's no need to audit every part of a product or service. This will result in duplicate testing of the same components and content types across different areas.

Instead, you should focus on:

• getting a representative sample of your page templates and content types tested
• key components and interactive features
• your most common or important user journeys
• any particularly problematic areas you’ve seen in testing
• if you build a reusable components library, get all the components tested
• using a design element library (like the NSW Design System) which makes things easier in the long run as all components, colours and styles should already be compliant, and won’t require additional testing.

When to engage with suppliers

We advise to engage with an external accessibility auditor during the development and testing stages of your product development process. Don't wait until post go-live, ensure compliance is addressed proactively and any accessibility issues are identified and resolved early in the process well before your launch date.

Write an accessibility audit brief

Make sure you discuss the process and outcome with your auditors and that they don’t rely exclusively on automated tools. They should be conducting automated, manual and screen reader testing at minimum. Some may also offer usability testing for an additional fee.

In your brief, include:

• the name of your service and a description of what it is (it may be helpful to include screenshots and hyperlinks pointing to the location)
• who your users are
• which user journeys, tasks, patterns or page types you’d like the auditor to look at (if possible, provide a list of components in your pattern library)
• your timeline for the audit (allow enough time for bug fixes before you move on to the next stages of testing)
• which assistive technology and browser combinations you want the auditor to test with, if that’s something you’ve asked for
• what compliance level you want your product to be tested against. Suggest WCAG 2.2 Level AA at a minimum
• how much support you want, it’s a good idea to get support from the start and ongoing support after the audit (this could be things like; post-audit help, demonstrations or explainers or additional recommendations and resources)
• whether you’ll need help fixing any issues identified in the audit.

You should also tell potential suppliers:

• where you are in your development cycle
• if you want to attend any of the testing and the dates you could attend
• if any part of your service was built by a third party.

Visit the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) evaluation methodology if you’re not sure which pages to get tested or how the evaluation process works.

Picking a supplier

Don’t automatically go for the cheapest supplier, they often won’t represent the most valuable choice.

Look for suppliers that:

• have extensive experience of doing audits, preferably of government services
• are familiar with the most current WCAG criteria
• provide clear and actionable reports (ask for evidence)
• can help you prioritise issues and provide support in fixing them (for example developing coding solutions. It’s worth paying more for a supplier that can help with this)
• meet your individual needs.

Don't be afraid to shop around and find a supplier that meets your needs.

After the audit

You’ll need to prioritise and fix the issues raised in your audit report. Your supplier should be able to help you with this. Ensure these issues are fixed, prior to go-live.

It’s worth choosing a supplier that offer remediation support as a service and paying a bit extra if necessary.

Use your follow-up audit provided by the supplier to cross-check you’ve fixed all the issues identified.

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