Website accessibility is something that has been flying under the radar for quite some time. Any business’ website must be compliant (with very few exceptions) with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Non-compliance can potentially result in a costly lawsuit. Though more often than not, a business will first receive a notification that their website is not compliant with accessibility standards and will be given a deadline to bring their site up to current WCAG 2.2 standards. If your business has received such a warning, or if you’d just like to get ahead of any legal jeopardy, the first thing you will need is an ADA website compliance audit. This is also known as an accessibility audit, or a WCAG audit.
Not all audits are equal
There are many great tools that you can use to test your site’s accessibility. Many of these tools are free and will test one page at a time. Most of the paid testing tools will scan your entire site for you. But there is an important distinction between an accessibility scan and an accessibility audit.
Accessibility Scans
These will go by many names, and some companies may even use the word “audit.” An accessibility scan/check, etc. is an entirely automated scan of your website. This automated tool crawls your website and identifies any problematic issues in your code. The scanner can identify many accessibility issues, but it can’t detect everything. In fact, it’s estimated that automated WCAG scans are only able to identify 40-50% of the accessibility issues that are present on a website.
So why bother with an accessibility scan if it isn’t going to find everything? Automated scans serve a number of valuable purposes. Because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are extensive, any website might have dozens of different accessibility issues. A website manager could run an automated scan at any time to identify and resolve the “low hanging fruit.” Then when the time comes to perform a full ADA website compliance audit, the list of errors will be much more manageable.
Accessibility Audits
A full accessibility audit (also known as a WCAG audit or ADA website compliance audit) will usually include a combination of an automated scan and an extensive page-by-page manual audit of the website. One or more people will manually go through each page of the website (or at least all of the page templates along with some representative sample pages). They will frequently use tools like screen readers and other assistive technologies to navigate the website. Many companies who perform these audits frequently employ people with a variety of disabilities to test websites. This is the best way to make sure that a website is usable for everyone.
A WCAG audit done right will take dozens of hours to review the site and document the issues. As such, the price of an audit program (we’ll explain this in detail later in the article) is quite high. Expect the pricing to be around $10,000 or higher.
The WCAG Audit Process
There are several excellent web accessibility auditing agencies who are certified experts in WCAG standards, testing and compliance. The process they employ is similar among all of them. It looks roughly like this:
Automated accessibility scan
As we briefly describe above, the provider will run an automated scan of the entire website. Many have their own proprietary tool that they use to scan your website. Automated scans can identify a number of issues. Alternative text on images and links, color contrast between the text and the background color of the page, ARIA labels, labels on forms, and many more. They will export these issues into a report (CSV, PDF, or both) that they will then review for accuracy.
Manual website review
This is the meat of the ADA website compliance audit. A person will step through the website, page-by-page, using screen readers and other assistive technologies. Many, but not all, do employ people with disabilities to perform this work. And while it’s not necessary, it is particularly beneficial to have this perspective. A person with no disability can use a screen reader to navigate a website. And it’s generally fairly clear when an issue is present. But a sighted person may inadvertently click a link with their mouse or overlook an issue that a blind person might encounter. This is why it’s particularly important to make sure the provider you choose has a team of International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) certified accessibility professionals. It’s vital that they have a thorough knowledge of the WCAG and how to thoroughly test a website for compliance with these standards. Taking shortcuts or missing a step here or there could ultimately result in a lawsuit. So thoroughness and accuracy is essential.
The issues that the testers find will be combined with the results from the automated scan. The automated scans will frequently have false positives or identify possible issues that require manual review. One common issue is when text is on top of an image. An automated tool frequently cannot detect the color in the image, so it can’t then determine if the color of the text on top of it has a sufficient contrast ratio with the background.
ADA website compliance report
Many accessibility organizations have a team of developers who are specifically trained to remediate WCAG issues. However, many companies already work with a developer who knows their website well. So they’d prefer to use their own developer to make the necessary changes to their site. In these cases, the accessibility organization will provide a report to the developer with a list of every issue they must fix. This list should include the following:
- The issue that must be fixed (e.g. alternative text missing on an image)
- The part of the WCAG that this issue pertains to (e.g. 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A))
- The URL where the issue is present
- The line in the source code where the issue is present
Some companies take their reports to another level and provide a description of how to fix the issue, as well as a screenshot of the specific part of the page where the issue exists. These additional pieces can be quite helpful when trying to quickly track down a problem.
Remediation and re-review
Whether the accessibility company performs the remediation work or the client’s developer performs the work, they will go through each issue to fix it according to WCAG standards. Once complete, a secondary review of the site is necessary to verify that all issues have been fixed.
This is where the accessibility companies start to diverge. Some companies will do the exact same process they did the first time – a full automated and manual scan of the website. The reason behind this is, of course, thoroughness. They want to make sure they didn’t miss anything the first time around, and make sure that all of the issues found in the first test have been resolved. Other companies will only test the pages and issues they discovered in the first pass to verify the fix.
This is where most accessibility services end their engagement with their client. Though we have worked with one company who performs two full tests, followed by a third verification test. But such thoroughness is unusual. Though we are big fans of this approach.
WCAG/ADA Certification
A number of our clients have asked us if it’s possible to obtain a certificate stating that their website is compliant with WCAG standards. The answer to this is that it is possible, with a caveat. When a company performs an ADA website compliance audit, they can certify that at that moment in time when they completed the audit, the website was WCAG compliant. However, websites update and change frequently. So, the accessibility companies will offer a “moment-in-time” certificate or accessibility statement that testifies to that fact.
Some accessibility companies do offer a subscription program where they re-scan the site at scheduled intervals and re-verify compliance. In those cases, they will provide a statement or certificate that affirms that as long as they are actively under contract, the website is WCAG compliant.
Summary
Accessibility testing, auditing, and certification can be a lot to digest for people who work in this field and know all the ins and outs of it. But it can be completely overwhelming for those who don’t live and breathe accessibility. If you find yourself in this camp, and you have questions or you’d like some guidance, feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to explain your options and provide you with recommendations.
