An accessible website is a future-proof website. As the world’s population ages, disability increases so mainstreaming accessibility is not only right — it’s smart.
Web Accessibility Audit and Testing Process
A web accessibility audit involves a rigorous testing process of a website to evaluate its degree/level of accessibility according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). It involves:
Our accessibility auditing process consists of four stages:
- Use of automated evaluation tools
- Manual human check of all issues
- Testing using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader and screen magnifier
- Creating a written report of the findings/recommendations separated into the WCAG 2.0 conformance levels of Level A and AA. Level AAA is also available upon request.
User accessibility testing by people with disabilities is also available. User testing provides a powerful insight into the actual useability of the website over and above conformance to WCAG 2.0.
The web accessibility audit identifies specific pain points or barriers to web or digital accessibility by providing a comprehensive and detailed report of actionable steps required to move toward compliance. It includes:
- The WCAG 2.0 checkpoint to which the issue relates
- Screenshots of problems encountered
- Comments from our technical auditors and testers
- Our recommendations on how to remediate the issue
Page Selection Criteria
While ideally every page or element of a website or application should be evaluated, time and resource constraints often make this impractical. It is possible to have a reasonable expectation of the level of accessibility of the website providing careful sampling is conducted with consultation between Media Access Australia and your organisation.
A comprehensive sample of content pages, media and key processes is chosen for evaluation and technical accessibility testing according to the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (Draft) [https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-EM] created by the W3C WAI and published in July 2014.
A representative sample set should include:
- Common pages of the website such as homepage, contact us, search facility and login page (if present).
- All pages within a process, such as completing and submitting an online form or a transaction, including testing of error notifications and pages.
- Instances of pages that are representative of key processes or functionality, such as pages that are created using different templates, pages with dynamic content (carousels or sliders), pages with varying functionality such as media players, complex images or infographics, and pages with varying content such as images, tables, forms.
- Other relevant webpages such as error messages (404 – File not Found) or those relevant to accessibility.
- Key PDF and Word documents.