What to Expect in a Web Accessibility Audit

You want to know if your website is accessible, or you know it’s not and want to fix it. The first thing you get told – “We need to do an audit.”

I’m sure your first reaction is “Why do I need to pay for that? Can’t I just pay for accessibility remediation?”

The short answer – no. Without an audit, it’s hard to judge what exactly is wrong with your website. An accessibility expert could, of course, just start fixing things, but it might actually take longer.

The great thing about an audit? It identifies many recurring issues and actually saves us time during the remediation process. Think of it as the first step toward fixing your accessibility, which then saves the same amount of time or more than your audit cost. Web accessibility itself has a huge ROI (100:1), so audits and everything you do to improve it will pay you back.

If you’ve never had a website audit done before, especially an accessibility one, you might be curious what you should look for when you book one.

Let’s talk about what to expect in a web accessibility audit and how the process works.

Every website audit should start with automated scanners. And no, I’m not talking about overlay widgets like accessiBe.

There are several web accessibility scanning tools available, but my preference is WebAim’s WAVE tool. Built by an organization leading web accessibility best practices, WAVE does great at pulling up quick issues.

During automated scans, we can find issues such as missing ALT text, color contrast problems, skipped heading levels, and missing form labels.

In an audit, you’ll run an individual page through the scanner, pinpoint errors and warnings, and start to identify patterns of issues across the website.

Example of an Automated Report

The tool will scan your website’s code and report the errors and issues it finds. As an example, WAVE gives you a mini-report per page with the issues:

You can see in this screenshot that this site has 5 ARIA menu errors, 6 very low-contrast errors, and 14 redundant links. This gives us a starting point for what we need to work on, and everything we find in the automated scan is manually tested and added to our report.

Web accessibility is nuanced, so automated tools can only identify some issues. If anyone tries to sell you on a web accessibility audit, make sure that you always ask if their process includes a mix of automated and manual testing.

Manual testing is looking specifically for violations of WCAG 2.2 Level AA (the current, most up-to-date international guidelines) and for features that may make your website more difficult to use. To do this, we’re browsing your website with a keyboard, looking for common errors, and using a screen reader tool. This helps us best simulate the experience of people with disabilities using your website and identify their roadblocks.

During manual testing, items found during the automated testing should also be double-checked. I’ve seen an error or warning in an automated report, only to find it’s a false flag during manual reviews.

Examples of Accessibility Errors in Manual Reviews

So what kinds of things do we often find during a manual review? The most common issues are with keyboard navigation. People need to be able to tab through the areas of your website in reading order and move through them. Often, we discover that the tab order is wrong or that it’s difficult to skip past things.

Another super common problem we find in manual reviews? Your navigation dropdowns open on hover, not click. Hover animations can cause issues for multiple accessibility tools and be problematic for users who struggle with a mouse.

I’ve also discovered, from screen reader reviews, that the content was in the wrong order in the HTML, which means it’s read incorrectly by someone using the tools.

There are many things that won’t come up in an automated review, and most of them are the biggest roadblocks to real web accessibility.

While all of this can sound overwhelming, your accessibility audit report shouldn’t be. Most reports are prioritized based on errors and alerts, so you know which items are most important to start with.

At Captain Coder, we break our reports into header, footer, overall (repeated issues across multiple pages), and page-by-page. This helps you or your accessibility remediation team easily find issues as you start addressing them.

Then, each of these is broken down into 3 priorities:

• Errors
• Alerts
• Should Fix

Let’s talk about what those mean.

Errors

Web accessibility errors are the most important items you need to address. The high-priority issues causing real roadblocks to people using your website.

Every time I deliver an accessibility report, I stress that they need to start with the errors first. These items actively make your website more difficult to use for everyone, but especially those with disabilities.

Many of these errors also appear in automated scans and can serve as the basis for a web accessibility lawsuit. Tackling those first can help minimize your target.

Alerts

Alerts are your second-highest priority. While they won’t show as an error in automated scans, they will appear as Alerts. These are items that cause roadblocks for assistive tools but can be worked around with some effort. We don’t want to make our website harder for anyone to use.

Many of these alerts address User Experience best practices, such as adding focus states to buttons, using proper heading sizes in the correct order, and using semantic HTML.

Should Fix

The last items we add to a report are the “should fix” issues we’ve identified that won’t appear in scans but do make your website more difficult to use or understand.

Many of the “should fix” web accessibility items improve the user experience and SEO of a site, as they often overlap. Items like hover states on links, broken links, or visually confusing text can be improved to increase understanding.

Think of it this way – errors get rid of the roadblock. Alerts are your gas pedal. And “should fix” items are your cruise control.

Passing Color Combinations

Not every web accessibility report is going to include this, but ours always give you the color combinations you can safely use.

One of the first things we test are the colors used within your site. We’ll run each combination through WebAim’s Contrast Checker and mark down in the report which are safe to use and at what level.

The difficult part of any web accessibility audit is finding some brand colors that just can’t be used together. They’re not legible. When that happens, we will have to make some design changes. Sometimes we’re able to do that with some minor tweaks, but I’ve had times where we’ve had to do a bigger overhaul.

We provide these at the end of the report and address any glaring issues with our clients so that they know what remediation steps need to be taken. They’re also listed as errors within the report where they’re found.

Web accessibility is an investment, but it offers one of the largest ROIs in marketing. You can’t invest in something, really, if you’re flying by the seat of your pants. How often has that worked for you?

An accessibility audit for your website helps you create a solid plan, maximize ROI, and know exactly what to fix, how to address it, and even how long it could take. It’s a lot easier to budget for something when you have a clear idea of what you’re actually budgeting.

And let’s not forget, you’ve got some web accessibility laws you need to be worried about, so an audit helps you plan for those.

I get that it’s never fun to “pay upfront” for something, but when it comes to web accessibility, an audit is your best path forward.

Interested in what one can look like for your business? Take a look at Captain Coder’s comprehensive web accessibility audits. They include not only everything we’ve discussed but also screenshots of issues and examples of how to fix them.

Really – can you wait much longer?