Services > Accessibility Audit
An Accessibility Audit is primarily for organisations wishing to understand how well the website or app in question supports use by people with disabilities and to what level they comply with the WCAG accessibility guidelines and who need a check list to guide them toward making necessary improvements.
The Benefits of Accessibility Audits
There are many benefits to providing an accessible website for your users. Here are just a few:
- Websites that are accessible perform much better in SEO
- Improving accessibility also improves usability and so it should not just be seen as something for people with disabilities
- Accessibility improvements tend to help people with sight and cognitive difficulties and that generally means the older population. This just happens to be the fastest growing and most affluent online user base.
- Reduced risk of legal action for non-compliance – the law requires organisations to make reasonable adjustments to enable people with disabilities to interact with them. An accessible website is one such adjustment.
Audit Services
We provide best practice Accessibility Audit services for your website and apps to identify how they perform against the World Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG. Our audit services include the following:
- Accessibility audits to W3C level A, AA and AAA
- Mobile accessibility audits
- Three different deliverable formats depending on your needs from table to management report.
- Accessibility advice and consultancy
Our Accessibility Audits are delivered by experts and are NOT automated software audits.Our service will show you where you comply, where you fail to comply and we can also show you how to fix any issues.
Our Methodology
Our Accessibility Audit uses a best practice methodology to review a sub-set of pages from your website or app against the level of WCAG compliance your organisation is aiming for. Accessibility is now reasonably mature and the conventions clearly set out by WCAG and so we feel there is no need to try and adapt or complicate the best practice methods that already exist.
Version 2.0 of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) contains 61 checkpoints split into three conformance levels – A, AA and AAA. We typically audit to level A or AA (AA is what we recommend) and it is rare that a website is required to meet level AAA. Level A includes 25 checkpoints and level AA a further 13 checkpoints all of which are covered in conformance with the guidance set out by WCAG.
Most websites and apps are built using templates and so it is not necessary to test every page. We therefore test an example of each template plus any other unique content items such as forms, data tables, images and maps. For example, an accessibility audit for a 100 page website would see us auditing only 6 or 7 pages.
Delivering the Findings
The standard deliverable is a spreadsheet containing the results for every checkpoint for each page we have audited.
There are three tabs in the spreadsheet covering;
- Summary of Statistics
- Detailed Checkpoints
- Colour Contrast
There are more sophisticated reporting options for those organisations that need them and these are described below.
CASE STUDY:
We were asked to complete WCAG evaluations of a new payment system app on mobile platform for a large European payments company.
The final developed apps were pre-launch and we could only access them on-site. We completed the audits at the customer offices on iOS and Android devices and delivered the detailed excel spread sheet reports. The client rectified the issues that caused failure and we then re-evaluated the app and confirmed they conformed with level AA of WCAG and could launch with confidence.
Have a Project in Mind?
