Sampling for Testability

I think our old means of testing may be the problem faced by many new SCs.
If a range of values is 16M we cannot look at all of them. How ever if we
only pick 2 that may not be enough for a quirky page we cannot even
predict, because we are all reasonable coders. Why not consider new methods
of testing. Like sampling.

Take color. We have a sample space of 16M squared. Of those only a subset
is viable since contrast is needed. But it is still a very big number. I it
would make sense to compile a list distribution of the number of foreground
and background colors used by web sites. Step 1 or 2 standard deviations
beyond the mean add 1 to that number and test that many color pairs chosen
randomly so that color contrast is maintained.

For COGA we could employ user testing. Once again computing sample size is
straight forward.

We would have to give up determinism for acceptable probability. Most
product testing is done that way. They don't test every car of the assembly
line for crash survival.

When we have ranges to large to test by hand or machine, or we have tests
that require user testing we can use statistics. That will give us .95
assurance, and really, do we do better with accessibility testing.

Wayne