Well, of course everything always goes as planned. Or then again, of course not. And when they don’t go the way you thought, planned or wanted, you might get a temptation to just let it go. But letting go would let you only quit, not finish. Determination or stubbornness – call it what you will – you need it. Especially when handling things that are voluntary and not always easy to squeeze in to your day.

That being said, I’ve been struggling. Anyhow, here’s a small report on things I’ve managed to accomplish so far.

Day 7: Find an accessibility bug.

I suppose it was this one that broke my flow. First of all, I came in a day late, dollar short. Second thing was that I’ve never done any accessibility testing. That, me being in the case, leads some  issues.

I have always been ‘try first, stumble and read the manual to get to know what did I do wrong’ -type of guy. This time was no exception. I ended up reading few short sentences on the  W3 accessibility testing wiki and rushed my way to turn on accessibility features on my notebook. After fooling around for awhile I got nowhere, if not to the land of frustration. The laptop is old and slow and it had difficulties to read the web pages in Finnish so that I would actually understand. That was due to the lack of memory (most likely) and bad/lacking support of the chipset. I’m running CloudReady/Chromebook OS on Asus EeePC with Intel Atom chipset. It fails to work on most of the OS I’ve tried.

So I gave up.

You see, testing is my profession and therefore it actually is my passion. But not on my spare time. I have divided my days between work and non-work, and it suits me fine. It just don’t help doing test related tasks (regardless how fun they are :D) on my spare time. It’s not that I wouldn’t like, but as I have my priorities at work, I also have them when I’m at home. And in that kind of issues, it actually is really easy to quit. Which I did.

But now I went and read a bit more on accessibility testing and noticed that there is few semi-automated tools listed on the page. I suppose I’ll give them a try at work on some of our interfaces. Semi automation is still partly automation (which I do like a lot) and I might also find something worthwhile. You never know where you end up when you start testing without a decent specification. And even with a spec you might find yourself in between rock and a weird place.

My plan was to write about the other tests I did (but did not write about), but this post starts to get long enough, I’ll have to fill the other blanks later on.