How to Conduct a Comprehensive Web Accessibility Audit in 2024
Is your website welcoming to all visitors, regardless of ability? If you‘re not sure, it‘s time to conduct a web accessibility audit. In today‘s digital-first world, having an inclusive online presence is not only a legal and ethical responsibility—it‘s also a smart business move.
By ensuring your website is accessible, you open your virtual doors to the over 1 billion people worldwide who have a disability that may affect their online interactions. You also future-proof your site against accessibility lawsuits, which have been on the rise. Perhaps most importantly, you create a better user experience for everyone.
Ready to get started? Here‘s your ultimate guide to running a thorough web accessibility audit in 2024 and beyond.
Why Web Accessibility Matters More Than Ever
Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. More specifically, people can:
- Perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web
- Contribute to the Web
Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including:
- Auditory
- Cognitive
- Neurological
- Physical
- Speech
- Visual
Accessibility is essential for developers and organizations that want to create high-quality websites and web tools, and not exclude people from using their products and services.
What‘s more, web accessibility is required by law in many cases. Regulations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508, and the European Accessibility Act mandate certain accessibility standards. Failing to comply puts your organization at risk of lawsuits, financial liabilities, and reputational damage.
But legal reasons aside, improving web accessibility is simply the right thing to do. It ensures equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse abilities. Considering that 26% of U.S. adults have some type of disability, you could be excluding 1 in 4 of your potential users if your site has accessibility barriers.
The business case for web accessibility is also strong. By making your site perceivable, operable, understandable and robust for all users, you can:
- Boost your SEO and search engine rankings
- Increase your market share and reach
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Enhance your brand‘s reputation and CSR
- Foster innovation and tap into new talent pools
In other words, web accessibility is a win-win for everyone. That‘s why forward-thinking organizations are making it a top priority in 2024. And it all starts with a comprehensive audit of your current web assets.
Types of Web Accessibility Audits
A web accessibility audit systematically checks a website or web application against accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The goal is to identify any barriers that users with disabilities may face and provide recommendations for remediation.
There are three main types of accessibility audits:
- Automated Audits: Using software tools to scan a website and test for common accessibility issues based on pre-programmed rules. This is the quickest method but also the least comprehensive, as automated tests only catch 20-30% of accessibility problems.
- Manual Audits: Having accessibility experts manually review a representative sample of pages/screens to identify more complex accessibility barriers that require human judgment. This provides a more accurate assessment but is also more time- and resource-intensive.
- User Audits: Conducting moderated usability testing with people with disabilities to get direct input on accessibility pain points and experiences. This offers the most insight but can also be the most challenging to coordinate.
For a truly robust accessibility evaluation, a combination of methods is recommended. Automated tools are great for catching "low-hanging fruit" across a large number of pages. Manual audits dive deeper into key user flows. And user testing provides valuable qualitative feedback to complement the other data.
How to Conduct a Web Accessibility Audit
While the specifics may vary depending on your organization‘s size, industry, and audit approach, the general process for conducting a web accessibility audit looks like this:
- Set your goals and scope. Clarify why you‘re auditing your website for accessibility and which standards you want to measure against (e.g. WCAG 2.1 Level AA). Define the scope of the audit in terms of number of pages, types of content, and key user flows to be evaluated.
- Choose your tools. Research and select the automated accessibility testing tools you‘ll use for the initial scan. Popular options include Axe, WAVE, SiteImprove, and AccessiBe, among others. If doing manual testing, put together a team of accessibility experts and reviewers.
- Run the automated scan. Enter your website‘s URL into the automated testing tool and start the scan. Some tools can spider an entire site, while others focus on a single page at a time. The results will flag accessibility errors and warnings.
- Manually review key pages. Have your accessibility experts and manual testers dive deeper into critical pages and user flows using assistive technologies and keyboard navigation. Make note of any accessibility barriers encountered along with steps to reproduce them.
- Conduct user testing. Recruit users with disabilities for moderated usability testing sessions. Ask them to attempt key tasks and describe their experiences using their own assistive tech. Observe their interactions and collect their feedback.
- Compile results and prioritize. Pull together the results from the automated scan, manual review, and user testing. Create a centralized list of accessibility issues found along with severity levels based on how they impact users. Prioritize the most critical items to fix first.
- Plan remediation roadmap. Work with development and design teams to create a remediation plan to address the accessibility issues uncovered. Determine timelines, resources needed, and how fixes will be implemented and validated.
- Re-test and maintain. After implementing accessibility improvements, re-run your auditing tools and manual checks to verify the issues are resolved. Put processes in place to check for accessibility in all new website content and features moving forward.
Key Areas to Assess During an Accessibility Audit
When evaluating a website for accessibility, there are four key areas to focus on as outlined by the WCAG. Your audit results should detail how well your site performs in each of these categories:
- Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive (i.e. not invisible to their senses). This includes providing text alternatives for images, captions for videos, and content that can be presented in different ways without losing meaning.
- Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable by all users. This means making all functionality available from a keyboard, giving users enough time to read and use content, and helping users navigate and find information.
- Understandable: Information and the operation of user interfaces must be understandable to all users. This includes making text readable and understandable, making content appear and operate in predictable ways, and helping users avoid and correct mistakes.
- Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This means using clean, standards-compliant code and providing status messages to users (e.g. form validation errors).
Within each of these four areas there are more granular success criteria to evaluate, such as color contrast ratios, heading structures, ARIA implementation, and focus management. The more comprehensive your audit, the more data points you‘ll have to guide your accessibility improvements.
Embedding Accessibility Into Your Processes
An accessibility audit is an important first step—but it‘s not the end of the journey. To truly succeed at creating an inclusive web experience, accessibility must become an ongoing part of your design and development processes.
This requires an organization-wide accessibility-first mindset, from leadership buy-in to cross-functional collaboration. Accessibility should be woven into every stage of a digital product‘s lifecycle:
- Requirement gathering and user research
- UX and visual design
- Content authoring and asset selection
- Development and code release
- Quality assurance and user acceptance testing
- Post-launch audits and monitoring
By building accessibility into your process, you bake it into the foundation of your user experience. Not only that, you can actually save time and money by catching accessibility issues early and often, rather than scrambling to remediate just before launch.
Making accessibility a core part of your digital strategy also means continually educating your teams on accessibility standards, tools, and best practices. It means practicing inclusive design and recruiting people with disabilities to provide ongoing user feedback. And it means celebrating accessibility wins while striving for continuous improvement.
Take Action and Start Your Accessibility Audit
Web accessibility can feel overwhelming, but you don‘t have to achieve perfection overnight. The important thing is to take that first step of assessing your current accessibility and identifying opportunities to improve.
Whether you start with a simple automated scan or dive straight into manual testing, any effort toward a more inclusive web experience is worthwhile. Not only is it the right thing to do—it‘s good for business and your users.
So use this guide as your roadmap to conduct your accessibility audit and kickstart your journey to a more accessible, compliant, and user-friendly digital presence in 2024 and beyond. Your users (and bottom line) will thank you.
