The DPUB ARIA Recommendation define extensions to HTML4/5 for support of extended semantics. These semantics make it easier for Assistive Technologies to interpret and present content to users with varying physical and cognitive abilities.
The purpose of these tests is to help ensure that user agents support the requirements of the Recommendation.
The general approach for this testing is to enable both manual and automated testing, with a preference for automation.
In order to run these tests in an automated fashion, you will need to have a special Assistive Technology Test Adapter (ATTA) for the platform under test. We will provide a list of these for popular platforms here as they are made available.
The ATTA will monitor the window under test via the platforms Accessibility Layer, forwarding information about the Accessibility Tree to the running test so that it can evaluate support for the various features under test.
The workflow for running these tests is something like:
Remember that while these tests are written to help exercise implementations, their other (important) purpose is to increase confidence that there are interoperable implementations. So, implementers are the audience, but these tests are not meant to be a comprehensive collection of tests for a client that might implement the Recommendation.
As tests are run against implementations, if the results of testing are submitted to test-results then they will be automatically included in documents generated by wptreport. The same tool can be used locally to view reports about recorded results.
If you are interested in writing tests for this environment, see the associated CONTRIBUTING document.