Short guide to a accessibility audits
This is my short guide to what accessibility audits are and what you should expect from them. It's based on the 100s of audits I've now done for organisation of all sizes in all different industries.
What is an audit?
An audit is a structured formal assessment of the accessibility of a digital product or service. Ideally, the audit should be completed by a technically skilled person. This person will complete a series of tests to check to what extent a digital interface meets a recognised accessibility standard. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the most common standard.
What are your objectives?
Why are you doing the audit? Common reasons include:
- reaching a compliance target (legal, regulatory)
- responding to a complaint
- improving the user experience
- preparing for a website launch or redesign
An audit helps provides a snapshot of your accessibility quality against a set scope.
What will you get?
The results of an audit should provide a clear view of your current baseline accessibility position. The results are made up of:
- passes
- fails
- warnings and best practices
against the 55 checks (success criteria) outlined in WCAG (2.2 AA).
What each finding should include
- description of the issue
- location of the issue
- relevant WCAG success criterion
- evidence (screenshots or examples)
- user impact
- recommended remediation approach
Is an audit right for you?
If what you need is a detailed analysis of your current accessibility status against a predefined scope, then an audit is ideal. But, depending on where you are in a project, who is interested in your accessibility outputs, and what you're going to do with accessibility outputs, an audit might not be the best thing for you.
A good accessibility partner will explain what other approaches will help you with your needs. It may be, for example, that training or user research is better for you depending on your context.
Important:Attempting to audit everything is almost always impractical. For this reason, audits mostly take a sample based approach.
Your auditor should work with you to identify and list the unique content and components across your website or app. This list is what they should then test. This approach is most efficient and pragmatic.
Many modern wesbites are built using a central set of components which are shared across pages. Improvements to these components automatically roll out across all instances they appear. This is why a sample based approach increasingly makes sense for the modern web. A non sample based approach is likely to lead to duplication of effort, diminishing returns and higher costs.
Preparation for an audit
Assuming an audit is what's useful for you now, here are key things that help you prepare.
Scope
Identify and share the following with the person doing your audit. You should focus on the key:
- pages / screens
- components
- content / media types
- journeys, tasks
In your website or mobile application.
Technical set-up and readiness
The most important thing for your auditor is that they can access your digital content and the environment remains stable before, during and (for a period), after the audit.
You also need to consider whether it is better for them to access your pre-live (test?) environment or live.
You should also work with your auditor to ensure they have all necessary log-in or user credentials to access the content and components that are in scope and that they can complete all necessary tasks or goals.
If there are any transactional aspects to your website, have or can you, provide dummy payment details?
Reporting outputs
A strong audit report often contains:
- executive summary for stakeholders
- detailed issue log for delivery teams
- screenshots and examples
- remediation recommendations
- summary of overall accessiblity status or risk
When user research might be more appropriate
User research focusses more on whether your users can achieve their goals, whether your product or service answers the right questions and provides the right features.
Accessibility audits generally focus on the extent to which the container for features (interface) can be used by a broad group of users — from a standards and compliance perspective.
Research probably focusses on:
- how users complete key tasks
- whether navigation is intuitive
- whether content is understandable
- overall satisfaction and confidence
Next steps after an audit
An audit report is the beginning… not the end.
Make sure you have sufficient access to support after you get your audit report. Have you agreed with your audit organisation that they will be available to provide support and clarification for any remediation questions?
If you aren't able to fix the issues identified from your audit then it has not made any measureable impact.