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.

<aside> ⏰ Just need a quick check on the big-ticket issues? Use WAI’s Easy Checks - A First Review (It’s a bit outdated but still good).

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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:

WCAG Success Criteria

HTML and CSS

WAI-ARIA

How to use a Screen Reader

<aside> 🎓 Learning? The A11y Courses Github repostitory is, by its own description, “courses, webinars, educational videos, and more, offered in web accessibility”. Also see the W3C's List and DigitalA11y course lists.

Specific resources that may prove helpful:

https://web.dev/learn/accessibility/ An introduction to accessibility and practices for front-end development.

https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/pwaa/ This big book covers multiple topics. Take with a grain of salt at points - it covers reporting methods that don’t apply to Cantilever’s practices.

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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: