Overview

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a rubric of commonly-accepted accessibility measures which are a good starting point. If a site is compliant with WCAG’s ”AA” standard, it is considered reasonably accessible for most users.

Who Can Do This

Accessibility audits are tricky and require specialized knowledge beyond what a normal developer knows. The Success Criteria are not always immediately obvious, there are multiple subjects you’re ideally familiar with, and accessibility conformance is an issue with real (and expensive) legal stakes. There is a reason why there are large professional companies with full-time experts on the matter.

However, at Cantilever we are dedicated to empowering all team members to grow their accessibility knowledge, and learning how to do audits is a great way to do so. If you want to learn how to conduct audits, please focus on:

How to Conduct an Audit

Our process is to use the WCAG-EM, a proven five step process for evaluating a site’s accessibility conformance, which has its own handy-dandy report generator tool which we use to create our output. This process describes specifically how we use it at Cantilever to conduct audits within our workflow.

Here is a video walkthrough (Cantilever Team Only) of Robin going through the process:

1. Explore the target website

If you are not already familiar with the website, check it out. Gain a good bearing about the nature of the website, its common pages, its functionalities, and key user flows. Read the entry for it and get a good sense of why it exists and how it should work. Feel free to ask questions of the project team.

2. Define the scope of the test

Before you start, figure out:

3. Start the WCAG-EM Report

The WCAG-EM Report Tool is a web-based tool that helpfully walks through the five steps of WCAG-EM. That will guide you through testing each WCAG criteria and help creating a report in a standardized format. Start a new report there. There are three steps before you get to the actual testing part:

4. Audit the sample

Now, you will actually conduct the test!

The WCAG-EM has a section for each of the Success Criteria required for conformance to the level of accessibility you select. Your job is to use testing techniques (automated and manual) to make an assessment of the site’s conformance or non-conformance for each criteria.

WCAG-EM does not require that you test in any particular way, just that you assert that you have tested each Criteria completely. Fortunately, the WCAG-EM Report Tool makes it easy to keep track of your progress as you audit.

5. Generate Your Report

Once you’ve filled out all the information, save and export your report as HTML.

Create a new document in the table. That will contain some instructions, follow them. Then send the Asana task back for review. Nice job!!