You spend a lot of time remediating accessibility issues. Every image has ALT text, focus order makes sense, and forms work with screen readers. But a new feature, design update, content change, or code fix can undo that hard work and introduce an accessibility issue without anyone noticing. That’s why you should build regression testing into your accessibility testing process.
That’s why regression testing belongs in your regular accessibility workflow. Test, make changes, test again. It’s how you make sure the accessibility fixes you worked so hard to make stay put.
What Is Regression Testing?
Regression testing means re-running your existing test cases after any changes to your website or other digital assets to make sure existing accessibility hasn’t broken. In other words, it checks whether the change introduced a new accessibility issue or made an existing one worse.
Regression testing differs from retesting. Retesting checks whether a specific issue was fixed, while regression testing tests whether that fix broke something else in the system.
For example, a developer might update a form component and accidentally remove a label association. A redesign might introduce a color combination that no longer meets contrast requirements. A change to a modal could affect keyboard navigation or focus management.
Accessibility is functionality, and it breaks the same way everything else does. Regression testing will help identify those breaks before they make it into production.
How to Maintain Website Accessibility After Updates
Because regression testing is repetitive, it’s a natural fit for automation. Tools like DubBot can continuously scan your site for accessibility issues, ensuring updates, deployments, and design changes don’t reintroduce barriers you've already resolved. The result is a more sustainable accessibility testing process that supports long-term compliance, protects hard-won progress, and keeps accessibility integrated into your day-to-day workflow rather than treated as an occasional audit exercise.
The most practical approach to regression testing is to:
- Establish a baseline. Test your current website or key components and document existing accessibility issues.
- Make your changes. Roll out that new feature, redesign, bug fix, or content update.
- Run the same accessibility checks again. This is where automated testing really is a rockstar. It can quickly flag new WCAG issues.
- Compare the results. Look specifically for new or worsened issues and don’t treat existing issues as new issues.
- Manually verify changes. Include manual testing, along with automated tools for regression testing, to ensure keyboard navigation, focus behavior, how screen readers announce content, and complex interactions remain accessible and usable.
Prioritize features that will stop a user in their tracks if they were broken. Features like user login, navigation, completing a purchase, or registering an account.
The Benefits of Regular Regression Testing
Regular accessibility regression testing makes accessibility part of your continuous website monitoring, rather than something that happens periodically.
Run automated checks as part of your development or content workflow to shift left in accessibility and flag issues when they are easier and cheaper to fix.
By pairing automated testing with manual testing, you create a sustainable, repeatable approach to accessibility that scales with your site and gives you a better chance of protecting the accessibility of the entire user experience.
An accessibility audit captures your website's current state at a given point in time. Regression testing keeps that current state accurate and up to date as your site changes and evolves. By building accessibility checks into every feature release, code update, and redesign, you can catch new issues before they undo your progress and help ensure everyone can keep using your website.
Resources
- Accessibility Regression Testing
- What is Regression Testing? Definition, Tools, Examples
- Accessibility Regression Testing: Implement Accessibility
- Integrating automated accessibility tests into CI/CD pipelines
A human author creates the DubBlog posts. The AI tools Gemini and ChatGPT are sometimes used to brainstorm subject ideas, generate blog post outlines, and rephrase certain portions of the content. Our marketing team carefully reviews all final drafts for accuracy and authenticity. The opinions and perspectives expressed remain the sole responsibility of the human author.
