Digital accessibility is a priority that must be viewed from the outset of ADA compliance and WCAG standards. If you plan to build a new website or redesign an existing website for compliance, it is not a challenge to incorporate digital accessibility. To ensure compliance, you may consult the WCAG guidelines and check for tips to get started with the W3C standards.
To do an accessibility audit and ensure compliance, you may regularly conduct manual checks. You may also check for logical navigation and also the site structure. You may also keep an eye out for the new features added, which may not align with the accessibility guidelines. To ensure these, you may also consult a good accessibility compliance expert. Doing self-assessment and troubleshooting the major challenges may be a good point to start. However, maintaining digital accessibility is a very time-intensive effort that may require knowledge of the laws related to it as well as the standards. A good digital accessibility consultant can save your time and effort in this regard.
Expert approach to accessibility check – AccessiBe
- Using automated checker
Experts suggest manual testing, but sometimes it is also subjected to human errors. By nature, digital content with frequent updates and additions may pose some errors in digital accessibility errors going unchecked. You may also need to consider dynamic content, which can be used to build pages on the go like the search results. AccessiBe also suggests that using automation tools in accessibility checking will help create a solid approach to ensuring accessibility.
- Manual accessibility checking
Manual accessibility checking is a human review process to determine if any specific accessibility issues exist on the web pages. Here are some examples of manual accessibility checking.
- Manually navigating through the web pages with a keyboard only to make sure all content can be comfortably accessed and engaged without using a mouse.
- Using a screen reader to listen to the website content and ensure that the text content and the controls can be accessed easily by such a tool.
- Checking embedded media to see if closed captions and no rapid flashing confuse the users.
- Checking the website on various devices with varying screen sizes and different resolutions to see if there is seamless performance.
Whatever mode of accessibility testing you use, it is essential to ensure that you can easily navigate, understand, and use the software in varying conditions by ensuring compliance with WCAG standards. Along with the above two modes of testing for accessibility, you can also try our user testing method. The accessibility features can be tested by using the real users and finding out the challenges they face to work on those further.
AccessiBe is a provider offering accessibility tools and support for websites and applications to ensure accessibility. They are providing support to many clients, including Fortune 500 companies. As accessibility is becoming a necessity for all to be compliant with, all of them need to run an accessibility compliance audit and further measures to ensure accessibility.