The last month, week and day before your WAS exam

Four weeks out: budget against the weighting

The WAS Body of Knowledge publishes its weighting, and it should shape the whole month. Domain 1, creating accessible web solutions, is 40 per cent. Domain 2, identifying accessibility issues, is another 40. Domain 3, remediating them, is 20.

That split surprises people who expect a testing exam. Four questions in ten are about building the thing correctly in the first place: semantics, names, roles, states, focus, dynamic updates. Another four are about finding what went wrong. Only two in ten are about the fix.

The trap here is the opposite of the one CPACC candidates fall into. On WAS, the tempting domain is Domain 3, because remediation is what most of us do for a living and it feels like home. It is also the smallest slice of the exam. Meanwhile Domain 1 is where the ARIA specification lives, and ARIA is the single largest source of confidently wrong answers on this exam.

A workable month:

• Week one. Domain 1. The accessibility tree, semantic HTML, accessible name computation, ARIA roles and states, keyboard interaction and focus management, dynamic content, single page applications.
• Week two. Domain 2. Conformance and what a claim means, WCAG-EM, assigning success criteria and documented failures, interoperability, then testing by screen reader, by keyboard, and for low vision, cognitive, auditory and touch.
• Week three. Domain 3 in two or three days, which is proportionate, then whichever domain your practice scores say is weakest.
• Week four. No new reading. Timed mocks and hands on a real page.

Against the A11ytek WAS course, that is lessons 1 to 8, then 9 to 16, then 17 to 19.

Reading is the wrong activity now

WAS questions are written about code. A stem will give you a widget, or a snippet, or a described behaviour, and ask which success criterion it violates or which change makes it pass. You cannot answer those reliably from memory of a specification you have only read.

So in the last month, every study session should end with something on screen. Build a disclosure and tab through it. Put aria-label on a div with no role and see what the accessibility tree does with it. Turn on a screen reader and listen to a form you built yourself, then break one label and listen again. Thirty minutes of that teaches more about name computation than an hour of reading will.

The Body of Knowledge is explicit that you should test with at least two screen readers, and it names the combinations worth using. If you have only ever used one, the last month is when to fix that, because questions about assistive technology behaviour assume you have seen more than one tool.

A useful target at the end of each domain is a practice score in the low nineties before you move on. That is deliberately above any pass mark. Technical multiple choice is unusually easy to answer correctly for the wrong reason, because the right fix often appears alongside three fixes that would also work in some other situation. A margin above the line is how you catch the ones you got right by luck.

One week out: four kinds of wrong

By now the only thing happening should be full mocks under real conditions. Seventy-five questions, two hours, nothing open on the second monitor. That is about ninety-six seconds a question, which is generous compared with CPACC and still tight when the stem contains code you have to read twice.

Sort every wrong answer into one of four piles. Each one needs a different response.

• You did not know the criterion. A real gap. Go back to the lesson rather than the flashcard, because what you are missing is usually the boundary between two neighbouring criteria, and a single card cannot show you a boundary.
• You knew the criterion and picked the wrong level. Extremely common, and entirely fixable in a week. Levels are the one part of WCAG that is pure memory, and the recall lists below are built for exactly this.
• You reached for ARIA when the answer was native HTML. This is the signature WAS mistake. The first rule of ARIA use says do not use it if a native element or attribute already gives you the semantics and behaviour you need. Several questions are built to see whether you apply that rule under time pressure.
• You knew it and talked yourself out of it. Nothing to study. More timed practice is the fix, and that is what the week is for anyway.

If the second and third piles dominate, you are closer than you feel, because both of those are recall problems rather than understanding problems. If the first pile dominates, take one more reading day out of the week and spend it on whichever lesson keeps appearing.

The last two days: the parts that are pure memory

Judgement cannot be crammed. Exact numbers and exact levels can, and they are where marks leak, because there is no way to reason your way to them. Read each list, cover it, write it out, check.

The night before

Do not open a topic you have never studied. Something met for the first time at that hour will not be in place by morning, and discovering a gap costs you more in confidence than the question is worth in marks.

Twenty minutes on the recall lists is enough. Then close the laptop.

Exam morning

If you are sitting remotely, test the proctoring software on an earlier day, not on this one. Clear the desk, because a remote proctor can ask you to show the room and anything within reach becomes a conversation. Have your identification ready.

Once you start, keep moving. Flag anything that makes you pause and come back to it. Four minutes on one widget question is three other questions you never read properly.

Read code in the stem twice before you read the options. On a technical exam the options are designed to look reasonable, and the difference between the right one and the plausible one is usually a single attribute.

When two answers both look correct, ask which one a screen reader user would actually notice, and ask whether the native element would have done the job. Those two questions resolve more WAS items than any other tactic.

Additional time is available as an accommodation, and arranging it is an ordinary part of the process.

Three things not to do in the final week

• Do not start a new question bank. A fresh one at this stage mostly tells you what you have not covered, which is both demoralising and useless. Finish the one you have.
• Do not chase a pass percentage. IAAP uses scaled scoring and publishes no fixed pass mark, so any number you have been told is somebody's guess. Knowing the Body of Knowledge is the only strategy that survives that.
• Do not skip Domain 3 because it is only 20 per cent. Fifteen questions decide a borderline result, and remediation is the domain most WAS candidates could lift in two days, because the material is already in your working life.

Practise the way the exam is weighted

The A11ytek exam prep app holds a large bank of WAS questions with written explanations, and its mock draws from them weighted 40, 40 and 20 across the three domains, so a practice score is comparable with the real thing rather than with whatever mix you happen to pull.

One hundred questions across the three certifications are free, with no sign-in and no email address, if you want to see the format before committing to anything.

Start practising Back to the full study guide