Updated 11/7/2023
Many companies understand that digital accessibility is essential to reach more customers and meet legal guidelines, yet still have questions about how to make digital assets compliant.
That’s where an accessibility audit comes in.
Conducting a web accessibility audit efficiently identifies necessary updates, whether those are customer-facing, internal, or within the code. Various accessibility audit tools are available that provide valuable data. This article will discuss these tools, how to conduct your audit, and where to find help if you need it.
What Is a Website Accessibility Audit?
A website accessibility audit is the process of assessing a digital property for accessibility issues to see how well it accommodates the needs of people with disabilities. If a website does not conform to web accessibility standards, people with disabilities will often have a frustrating and fruitless experience online.
Why Perform an Accessibility Audit?
Conform to Standards
Regulations around the globe aim to ensure all people have access to businesses, education, and digital spaces. In the U.S., the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) ensures people with disabilities have equal access to public spaces and businesses. Recent court rulings have clarified that this includes digital assets, including websites. In addition, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and HHS newly proposed rule further define digital accessibility and the need to ensure access to all.
Similar regulations exist today in other countries. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires accessibility for products and services sold throughout the European Union member states, and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) sets accessibility standards in Ontario, Canada.
As regulations continue to evolve, companies are relying upon widely-accepted accessibility best practices and conformance to standards, such as WCAG 2.1, to guide their accessibility standards. Companies that do not provide an accessible experience are at risk of getting sued or suffering reputational damage to the brand.
Add Customers and Enhance Your Brand
People with disabilities often rely on assistive technology to use the web, mobile apps, or self-service kiosk devices. For example, users with visual impairments use an assistive technology called a screen reader, which will convert text on a web page to audio output they can hear. They rely on a keyboard rather than a mouse to navigate through and interact with websites. If a site is set up to accommodate screen readers, the visually impaired person’s experience will be comparable to that of an individual without an impairment.
However, when websites are not accessible, people with disabilities can find a business’s site frustrating or, at worst, click away and shop elsewhere. By including accessibility features, you’re telling customers with disabilities that you value them and want their business, which in turn fosters customer loyalty.
Do the Right Thing
It’s good business practice to ensure all people have access to your website, digital products and services. This can include accommodations for older people. According to the most recent U.S. Census, one in six Americans are over the age of 65. Vision, hearing, and mobility lessen as we age, which increases the need for assistive technology. If your website and digital assets are not accessible, you’re shutting out a significant number of potential customers.
Accessibility Is for Everyone
Assistive technology and accessibility tools are always evolving. For example, closed captions were first adopted in the early 1970s to assist people with hearing disabilities and are now used by nearly everyone to watch TV in a noisy bar, a social media video with the sound off, or to catch quiet dialogue in a movie. These features have been adopted widely because they improve the user experience for everyone and empower people with disabilities to have equal access to information and services.
Accessibility Standards and Policies
Becoming accessible requires your company to understand the various policies and standards for compliance.
ADA Compliance
The ADA is a law that covers a wide range of accessibility issues, from physical access to locations to digital access. For the purposes of this article, ADA compliance refers to web accessibility. While it’s common to refer to testing for accessibility as an ADA audit or ADA compliance audit, the law does not provide specific guidelines or steps companies must take. Instead, most companies rely upon the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure they are complying with the law.
WCAG Compliance
WCAG was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with other individuals and organizations around the world to provide “a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.”
Developers, designers, and UX specialists can use WCAG documentation to ensure web content, including text, images, sound, code, and markup, can be designed for accessibility. There are different versions, WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, and WCAG 2.2, that organizations can use to guide their process and various WCAG checker tools that help them access areas for improvement.
Section 508 Compliance
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies, organizations that receive federal funding, and those companies that contract with the U.S. government to ensure that their information and communication technology (ICT) is accessible to people with disabilities.
The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a tool companies can use to document the accessibility of their website or ICT using the WCAG standards. The VPAT is a check for organizations to ensure Section 508 compliance, as well as documentation when seeking government contracts or federal funding.
Other Policies
For those doing business outside of the United States, you should become familiar with accessibility standards abroad, as well. For example, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA) and the European Accessibility Act (EAA) are standards organizations must meet to do business in Ontario and EU member states, respectively. Both of these laws also use WCAG as the standard for compliance.
Website Accessibility Testing Methods
The prevailing standard for online accessibility is WCAG 2.1 Level A/AA. This standard includes 50 guidelines, or in WCAG terms, Success Criteria. Each must be checked with its own testing procedure, which takes time and various skill sets, depending on the criteria.
Because manual testing is so labor-intensive and time-consuming, companies may look for automated testing options. However, manual and automated testing provide different capabilities, and both should be considered in any accessibility audit.
Automated Testing
Pros: Scalable, efficient, fast, cost-effective
Cons: Not comprehensive
Automated testing is a fast and easy method for understanding the current state of your site’s accessibility and evaluating your risk. Accessibility checkers, including scanning and monitoring tools, are helpful for gauging accessibility as the site changes, and guarding against regressions. However, these tests may only focus on one area–for example, tools that are designed for ongoing monitoring, not initial accessibility audits.
Manual Testing
Pros: Thorough, checks all Success Criteria
Cons: Time consuming, labor intensive, doesn’t scale well
Because of the number of Success Criteria, it is not feasible to manually test an entire website or mobile app for accessibility. Instead, test a representative sample of pages, focusing on pages where issues are suspected, or user flows that are a high priority. Next, these sample pages are reviewed with assistive technologies, “testing tools” that people with disabilities use each day, such as JAWS, ZoomText, and Dragon Naturally Speaking. Auditors also review color contrast, keyboard access, and the underlying code. When an issue is discovered, auditors will then take a screenshot and document the details of the page for remediation.
Is There a Preferred Method?
One should look at manual and automated testing not as an either/or but complementary. Because manual testing is the only way to ensure you’re meeting all WCAG Success Criteria, the best practice is to perform manual testing on some regular cadence and then supplement your testing with automation. Manual audits provide the surest means to identify the breadth of accessibility issues within a site initially. Then automated testing can be applied over time to expand the scope of where machine-detectable issues exist and track the progress of known issues.
When and How to Conduct a Digital Accessibility Audit
To conduct an accessibility audit, organizations run tests on a sampling of web pages or mobile app screens that have enough diversity to represent the entire user experience. The results determine how well these web pages conform to WCAG success criteria. Like any other review, an accessibility audit can be comprehensive or high-level, depending on budget, resources, and time allowed to conduct the audit.
Whether you are building a website or preparing to launch your organization’s new digital app, a best practice is to embed accessibility testing into your testing process as early as possible and at each stage of your development process. By including accessibility early in your software development life cycle (SDLC) process, you can identify any accessibility issues that may arise at each phase, also known as continuous accessibility.
One of the significant benefits of building digital products with accessibility in mind from the start is the opportunity to develop an accessibility strategy with your team. This allows everyone to work together to accomplish your accessibility compliance goals. Team alignment saves time and money in the long run.
In some instances, your organization will need to test for accessibility after your developers and designers complete your website or app development. For example, if you discover existing accessibility issues, you should conduct an accessibility audit. Then, you can go back into the code to make changes to achieve your compliance goals.
Overall, it is much more efficient and cost-effective to build accessibility into a website before launch, as opposed to digging through the code to make adjustments after the fact.
Accessibility Audit Tools
Individuals conducting an accessibility audit have a host of accessibility testing tools and accessibility checkers at their disposal.
- Screen reader testing: A key element of a website’s accessibility is whether the content on the page can be read by screen reader software and whether it makes sense for the user. JAWS is the world’s most widely used screen reader software. A faster way to evaluate your website for JAWS compatibility is by using the screen reader testing tool, JAWS Inspect.
- Color contrast tools: People with color blindness or low vision may have difficulty reading certain color text upon color backgrounds. These tools, such as our free Colour Contrast Analyser, help companies quickly see what design elements may be difficult for some people to read.
- Accessibility management system: For large enterprise websites with multiple domains and complex applications, accessibility management systems help keep track of pages that need remediation, align teams to ensure consistency in their testing, and that they are abiding by best practices and procedures.
- Accessibility scanning and monitoring: These tools review accessibility within the code. Automated scanning reviews a site and alerts teams about potential issues, while a monitoring system helps ensure a site remains accessible with APIs that integrate accessibility checkers within the development process. TPGi offers these accessibility checkers as part of the ARC Platform.
- AT User Flow Testing: Assistive technology user flow testing is a straightforward, reliable and affordable way to get valuable UX feedback on digital products from assistive technology users. Getting first-hand perspectives from everyday assistive technology users offers you important insights on what’s working and what needs improvement.
- User Feedback: In a perfect world, no website would ever have any usability issues. A way to enlist the JAWS screen reader community is to enable JAWS Connect. JAWS Connect is a no-code solution that allows JAWS users the option of submitting an accessibility issue when it has been encountered on your website.
Getting Help With Your Accessibility Audit
Conducting an accessibility audit does require a certain level of proficiency with the concepts and fundamentals of digital accessibility to be a worthwhile endeavor. TPGi offers a few types of accessibility reviews that enable organizations with any size budget to get a better sense of the conformance level of their digital assets.
If you’re looking for an accessibility expert for guidance or an external resource to carry out accessibility audit testing on your website or app, contact TPGi today.