How to evaluate the accessibility of your website or app

Summary

• In this article you will find everything you need to evaluate the accessibility on your website, even if you have no prior experience.
• It includes information about key definitions, core concepts, workflow recommendations and a free template.
• An accessibility evaluation assesses how easily people with disabilities can use a product or service.
• With 20% of the Dutch population affected, it’s both a legal requirement and a human right.
• The audit process includes familiarizing with WCAG, exploring the site, and evaluating key pages. Findings are then prioritized based on severity and frequency.
• An audit takes about 10-12 day. You will also need to familiare yourself with the WCAG criteria before your start.
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What is an accessibility evaluation?

It's a process to assess how easily people with disabilities can use a product or service. The goal is to ensure that people with various impairments (e.g., visual, auditory, cognitive, or motor disabilities) can fully access and engage with your platform.

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Why conduct an accessibility evaluation?

• More than 3,4 million Dutch people have a disability. That's 20% of the population.
• It’s a human right. Great karma points.
• Legally required in the EU for many 'new' product.
• Reduces 'unnecessary' customer support request.
• Improves your favourite metrics (like active users, click through rates, profits, etc.)

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The 6 Steps of the Accessibility Audit process

1. Get ready.

• ‍First you need to get familiar with the WCAG criteria and how to check them on your website.
• Then, explore how to use a screen reader. A screen reader is a tool that reads out the content of a webpage to users who have limited eyesight.‍

2. Explore the target website. This will help you decide how to define the scope. Get an understanding of the following items:

• Page structure, navigation and layout
• Components (e.g. header, footers, forms, buttons, links)
• Services offered (e.g. help service, authentication)
• Type of content (e.g. video, audio, animations)

3. Define the scope.

• Certain criteria are specific to devices, certain types of content or services you offer on your website.

• Instead of evaluating every page, you want to choose the pages and functionalities that represent the broader experience of the website. This will speed up the audit process, which is especially helpful when evaluating large websites. 

4. Start the audit.

• Tag the pages you want to audit and create a visual overview that you can refer to during the audit.
• Now use your list of WCAG criteria to evaluate the pages from top to bottom. We like the following workflow:
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  1. Navigate the page using a keyboard
  2. Then navigate the page using the screen reader
  3. Inspect all the individual UI elements
  4. Check the page structure using the Rotary functionally
  5. And finally check contrast and font sizes.

• Now write down any issue you find.‍

5. Report the findings. You now have an overview of all the issues that need to be resolved.

• You might have dozens of issues so scoring the issues based on frequency and severity helps your team to prioritize what to pick up first.
• Optionally you can add recommendations for solutions for every issue. The WCAG website has a list of common solutions for every criteria.
• Now summarize key insights and present them to your team.
• And that’s it. You completed you're first audit. Congrats!

6. Conduct a usability test [optional]. We always recommend doing a usability test with 5-6 people who have limited eyesight or people with low literacy. Why?

• It helps to prioritize the order of addressing issues.
• It helps uncover accessibility problems that can only be seen in context of use.
• It enables us to ask ‘why’ questions about why an issue is important and how it impacts their experience.

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Use the Hike One Accessibility Evaluation template

We believe that every business should actively work on improving the accessibility for their users. But not everyone has the resources to hire an agency.

That’s why we decided to publish our template. It’s includes:

• Step-by-step instructions
• Overview of all WCAG criteria - including simplified descriptions
• Practical instructions how to check the criteria on page level
• Helpful links and references

Do you like our free template? Help us spread the word on accessibility and share this article on LinkedIn. 

Get an accessibility audit in 2 weeks

We regularly conduct audits for clients such as Liberty Global and Rituals Cosmetics and would love to add you to that list.

Learn more about pricing and deliverables