Accessibility Audit
An accessibility audit is a structured evaluation of a website or digital product for barriers that may prevent people with disabilities from using it.
An audit may evaluate a full site, representative templates, individual components, or specific user flows.
What It Evaluates
An accessibility audit can examine areas such as:
- Semantic HTML
- Keyboard navigation
- Focus states
- Accessible names
- Alt text
- Colour contrast
- ARIA
- Page structure and landmarks
- Forms and error handling
- Content and interaction patterns
Audits are often evaluated against WCAG and a defined conformance target such as WCAG Level AA.
How It Is Performed
A useful audit normally combines automated accessibility testing with manual accessibility testing.
Automated tools are efficient at finding certain detectable patterns. Manual review is needed for issues that depend on meaning, context, interaction, or judgement.
Testing representative templates and components is particularly useful because one shared problem can affect many pages.
Why It Matters
An audit turns a broad concern like “our site may have accessibility problems” into specific findings that can be investigated and prioritized.
The value is not the number of issues found. It is understanding what those issues affect, where they originate, and how broadly they occur.
Common Problems
Accessibility audits become less useful when teams:
- Treat automated results as a complete audit
- Report issues without explaining their impact
- Test pages without considering shared components
- Assign the same priority to every finding
- Fix individual examples without identifying repeated causes
How to Improve
Define scope before testing.
Record the affected component or template, relevant WCAG criterion, user impact, reproduction steps, and recommended direction for each meaningful finding.
Then look for patterns across the results before fixing issues individually.