Before discussing a web accessibility audit, it’s important to understand web accessibility. Web accessibility is making websites inclusive and information accessible for all users. Digital marketers, software developers, and graphic designers all have their roles in web accessibility.
To ensure that all your content is optimized for people with special needs, you’ll need a website accessibility audit performed by a team of experienced web developers.
A website accessibility audit is a detailed analysis of your website to determine how accessible it is to users with disabilities. Its end goal is to identify errors, and by incorporating accessibility, it benefits the users with disabilities and helps all the users of the website.
What Does It Reveal
Getting an accessibility audit for your website reveals your site’s weaknesses and gaps where disabled users or potential customers aren’t able to use your site correctly.
It measures how well a website, a physical structure, or even as abstract as an in-college individual meets the needs of specially-abled people. Hence, if you are trying to make your website more disability friendly, you are trying to raise its accessibility, enabling those to live more normal lives.
The Types Of Accessibility Audits
There are multiple accessibility audit types available to businesses. Choosing a specific one depends on the operation and your accessibility goals. For example, a risk audit is a good choice for someone looking for evaluation. This form of accessibility audit is more concerned with finding the accessibility blocks in your website. In the same way, you need a design audit if you are concerned about the accessibility status of your UI and UX.
- In-Depth Audit
It is considered an expensive testing type, and its purpose is to identify all improvement areas on your website based on your preferred accessibility standards. With this audit, you tend to receive a report containing all major accessibility violations, screenshots, videos, and recommended actions to fix them.
- Design Audit
This audit is performed on UX and UI wireframes to ensure they comply with the accessibility guidelines. As UI is a significant building block of any website, it is critical to conduct testing in this phase.
- Usability Audit
People with various disabilities are known to be involved with usability testing, and it is considered the most time-consuming form of an audit.
- Validation Audit
A validation audit is considered an add-on to the in-depth audit (discussed above). A validation audit is a quick re-audit that verifies that changes have been made.
- Evaluation Audit
An evaluation audit is considered a base-level audit, and it helps determine critical bugs that disabled people can find while interacting with your website.
Accessibility Audit And Human Investigation
We know and understand that automated tools serve the most valuable and essential purpose. They are quick, require little intervention, and provide immediate results. These tools, however, aren’t always the most accurate. Automated reports involve aspects like:
- Duplicate issues
- Call out false positives
- No root problem explained
Therefore, it’s essential for the team not to rely heavily on automated tools. Experts responsible for ADA website compliance audits inspect, analyze, test, and fix issues, helping understand user experience and reporting compliance in a way automated tools cannot capture.
One Aspect That Should Be Mentioned
Website owners assume that accessibility audits are focused on screen readers. Though software help in converting on-screen text to audio, making it extremely important, it’s also essential to recognize the full scope of disabilities.
The sole purpose of digital accessibility is to make the website more useful for everyone. It means not only people with disabilities, but everyone can enjoy the piece of that established framework.
Website accessibility audits must indeed be performed in a structured way to deliver valuable information. With a quick search, web admins can find dozens of automated tools to assess that accessibility.
Therefore, web accessibility shouldn’t be seen as an obstacle for organizations but as an opportunity to provide a barrier-free inclusive digital experience to all audiences.
Conclusion
Taking a strategic approach to accessibility audit will help you succeed and factor out other business requirements. Therefore, whether your website needs a few modifications or a complete change, a website accessibility audit serves you as a high-quality, reliable, and respectful service.