If the term web accessibility is something you're not familiar with, you're not alone. It refers to the accessibility of any given web or mobile application, to users with a range of disabilities. Audits are routinely undertaken to identify any potential barriers to use that degrade the experience of disabled users. Any challenges that users with disabilities might face while interacting and consuming information from your website, are identified during an accessibility audit. During all audit types, various manual and automated tests are performed on your application to help you identify a range of accessibility violations. Accessibility experts will use a wide range of tests to identify the maximum number of accessibility errors in an audit.

Of all the testing approaches, automated testing is one of the best ways to quickly identify easy-to-fix accessibility errors and to regularly assess the website adherance to international standards. However, this type of testing is insufficient for complete accessibility testing of a web or mobile app because it only detects approximately 40-60% of all potential accessibility violations. In order to detect as many errors as possible, you will need to incorporate automated and manual testing with a range of tools and a range of differing application users for a holistic perspective.

For example, an alt tag for a web page image can briefly provide a description of that image for a visually impaired person. This description is usually of 125-200 characters and tells us why the image is used in the content. Alt tags are an essential element for screen readers used by people with visual disabilities who might struggle to see the image. Through automated testing, you can easily identify the presence or absence alt tags but reviewing these alt tags with an actual screen reader would then be considered a manual check.

Types of Accessibility Audits

Differing types of web accessibility audits are conducted based upon the requirements of a business and its accessibility aspirations and commitments. Let’s explore different types of accessibility audits:

Design Audit

As the name suggests, this audit is conducted to ensure that your UX and UI wireframes are compliant with the standard accessibility guidelines. UI is an essential element for any website and early assessment of its accessibility is strongly recommended.

Evaluation Audit

It is considered an entry-level audit of your application that helps you in identifying only the critical accessibility errors which users with disabilities often encounter while interacting with your website. However, the report you get from this audit may not provide you with full recommendations for addressing the identified violations.

In-depth Audit

By conducting a comprehensive and in-depth audit, you can hope to identify all possible accessibility violations and areas of improvement based upon your specified accessibility standards, such as the WCAG 2.1 – A/AA/AAA, the ADA and Section 508. In this type of audit, both automated and manual testing is undertaken simultaneously. Once the audit is completed, you receive a comprehensive report which will detail all accessibility violations with screenshots, videos, reproduction steps, and the suggested actions to resolve them.

Validation Audit

It is a logical follow-up to the in-depth accessibility audit. This audit helps you ensure the changes made after an in-depth audit are fit for purpose and successful. It is a quick re-audit that helps in authoring a VPAT or a Statement of Conformance.

Real User Accessibility Audit

Finally, a real user accessibility audit is often considered to be the most time-consuming but effective audit. You will require the services of users with a real world range of disabilities and you will also need to objectively consider their findings in-line with the technical standards. You will also want to listen to more subjective person to person feedback about their honest experience of using your application.

Whilst the world continues to move towards a universally accessible customer experience, it is vital to test an application for its accessibility. Manually repeating all of the required testing is neither cost nor time effective. Through automated testing, you can maintain high accessibility compliance and be budget and time efficient.

Test Evolve's accessibility testing integration with Axe, generates an extensive accessibility report for your website and displays the results on our intuitive Halo dashboards following a detailed audit.