“Is our website accessible?” is one of those questions that sounds simple and isn’t. Plenty of people assume a plugin or an online scanner has it covered. Those tools have their place, but they only catch part of the picture. A proper audit is slower, more hands-on, and a lot more useful.
Here’s what one actually involves.
First, what WCAG is
WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They’re published by the W3C, the group that sets standards for the web, and they’re the yardstick most organizations, and most laws, point to. The current version is WCAG 2.2.
The guidelines are grouped into three levels: A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the one most organizations aim for. It covers the issues that cause real people real problems, without demanding things that are impractical for an ordinary website.
The four questions behind it all
Every guideline comes back to four ideas. Can people perceive the content? Can they operate the site? Can they understand it? And is it built robustly enough to work with the tools they use, such as screen readers? An audit is really those four questions asked of every part of your site.
What we check
In practice, a good audit looks at things like:
- Keyboard use. Can you reach and use every link, menu, button and form with the keyboard alone? Plenty of people can’t use a mouse, and a menu that only opens on hover can lock them out completely.
- Visible focus. When you tab through a page, can you always see where you are?
- Headings and structure. Screen reader users often jump from heading to heading to find what they need. If a page has no real headings, or they’re out of order, that becomes very hard.
- Images. Do meaningful images have useful alternative text? Do decorative ones stay out of the way?
- Color contrast. Is text dark enough against its background to read comfortably? WCAG sets minimum ratios, and light gray text on white is one of the most common failures we see.
- Forms. Does every field have a proper label? When something goes wrong, does the error message say what and where, in words and not just color?
- Zoom and small screens. Can the page be zoomed in a long way without text overlapping or content disappearing?
- Video and audio. Are there captions, and transcripts where they’re needed?
- Links and buttons. Do they make sense on their own? A page full of “click here” links is a puzzle when you hear them read out one after another.
Why scanners aren’t enough
Automated tools are good at finding some things, like missing alternative text or low contrast. They can’t tell you whether that alternative text actually describes the image, whether the reading order makes sense, or whether a pop-up traps a keyboard user. That takes a person, a keyboard and a screen reader, working through the site the way a real visitor would.
What you get at the end
A useful audit ends with a clear report: what’s wrong, where it is, why it matters, and how important it is to fix. Not a wall of jargon, and not a pass or fail stamp. From there you can decide what to tackle first, and fix things yourself or have them fixed for you.
Why it matters
Around one in four adults in the US lives with some form of disability, and many more have a temporary injury, aging eyes, or are simply using a phone in bright sunlight. Accessibility work tends to make a site better for everyone. Expectations, and legal requirements, have been growing too, especially for public bodies and organizations that serve the public. If you have questions about your own legal obligations, it’s worth talking to your lawyer.
If you’d like to know where your site stands, we can take a look.