Your Five-Step Guide to Conducting an Accessibility Audit
- Shelby Ruch
- May 16
- 3 min read
In today’s digital age, ensuring your website is accessible is vital: it can help grow your audience, protect you legally, and plus, it’s the right thing to do. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. This amounts to about 16% of the global population. Ensuring your website is accessible means that this population has equal access to your content, products, and services.
Whether you’re working toward complete ADA and WCAG compliance, want to create a better user experience, or are interested in how accessible your site currently is, a webpage accessibility audit is a critical first step. This guide will walk you through the needed steps to conduct an accessibility audit efficiently and effectively.
Step 1: Set a goal
Before you begin auditing, it’s important to understand its purpose. Are there legal requirements you need to meet? Or are you just trying to reduce any legal risk? Or is the priority on usability for all users? Some organizations are federally mandated to meet certain standards, so it’s important to know which category your company falls into. Setting a clear goal for the audit will help you determine its depth, who needs to be involved, and how to implement any results.
Step 2: Familiarize yourself with required guidelines
Once you set goals and understand your legal obligations, it’s important to familiarize yourself and your company with compliance standards. The most well-known are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, also referred to as WCAG, are international standards that outline how to make web content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust to those with disabilities. There are three levels of conformance: A, AA, and AAA, each representing a different degree of accessibility.
Level A is the minimum required level. It generally covers only essential considerations for the broadest range of users. It provides a foundation for accessibility, but may not fully address the needs of all users. Level AA is the middle level, and many organizations aim for complying with this level as it is a good balance between accessibility and practicality. Level AAA is the top level and has the most rigorous requirements.
Fully understanding these levels, along with any others, helps you ensure that your company has a baseline understanding of what compliance looks like in practice.
Step 3: Conduct manual testing
While automated tools may be a common starting point, the reality is that they don’t catch all – or even a majority of – accessibility problems. Many automated software have even found themselves in legal trouble for overpromising on their capabilities. It’s important to utilize manual testing to uncover barriers that affect your real users.
Some practical ways to begin manually testing include:
Keyboard navigation: Use the "tab" key to move through your website. Can links, buttons, and forms be accessed? And more importantly, can they be used?
Color contrast: Use tools like TPGI's color contrast analyzer to assess whether text is readable against its background.
Step 4: Review your content
Make sure all your content is inclusive – it’s not just about code or appearance of the website itself. You will need to review everything that users see, hear, and read. Start this process by:
Images: Add alternative text that describes the image in question.
Videos: Include accurate captions and transcripts.
Language: Keep writing clear and concise, avoiding unnecessary text.
Headings: Implement or update to structure content logically for screen reader navigation.
Forms and instructions: Ensure all fields have labels, clear instructions, and that error messages are easy to understand.
In summary, all content should be easy to understand, specifically for those who use assistive technologies like screen readers or text-to-speech converters.
Step 5: Test with real users
Make sure to get feedback from people who have disabilities. Nothing replaces real-world experience and feedback from actual users. If possible, involve users in your testing process who have a range of disabilities, including visual, motor, auditory, and cognitive. Ask them to provide feedback and any insights they have on:
Ease of navigation
Confusing layouts or content
Frustrations using assistive technology with your site
Areas your site may unintentionally exclude
These five steps are not a comprehensive guide that will ensure your compliance with guidelines. Rather, this is a starting point, not to mention an investment in your community, your brand, and your audience. Following these five steps and pursuing full accessibility will help you create a more inclusive experience for all who use your site.
Need help conducting your first audit or remediating your website? At Splash Box Marketing, we specialize in WCAG and ADA compliance training, remediation, and accessible web design. For help at all stages of your accessibility journey, contact us at info@splashbox.com.