How to Test Web Accessibility? A Modern Approach

How to Test Web Accessibility? A Modern Approach

For many engineers, designers, and site stakeholders, testing accessibility can be a daunting task. Without education or awareness, it can be challenging to determine the status of your site’s accessibility and whether it’s compliant with modern standards.

Most modern sites plan for accessibility considerations during development, but some older or more custom sites commonly miss accessibility considerations in their initial release. While it’s always easiest to plan accessibility from the beginning, it’s never too late to improve your site’s accessibility. From brand-new sites to legacy builds, let’s review the best methods for testing web accessibility.

Conducting an Accessibility Audit

When the status of a site’s accessibility is unclear, it is usually necessary to conduct an audit to find any issues and where they occur. Audits typically focus on the most visited public-facing pages but should also include internal pages. To get started, familiarize yourself with the different WCAG levels and success criteria so you can understand and prioritize your findings.

By the end of the audit, you should have a clear map of each page, its accessibility violations, and in most cases, the HTML element associated with each issue. With these insights, teams can plan a remediation strategy and a path to compliance.

Conducting a Self Audit

For small to medium sites with limited complexity, a self audit is often the fastest and most cost-effective way to assess accessibility—provided your team is comfortable using both automated tools and manual checks. A typical self audit strategy looks like this:

• List the pages you want to test
• Run an automated tool such as Deque Axe or Google Lighthouse
• Export results into a spreadsheet or similar format
• Manually audit key pages using a screen reader and keyboard-only navigation
• Conduct a code review to assess the use of Semantic HTML and ARIA

The combination of automated scans and manual checks will reveal most issues. By the end of your self audit, you should have detailed insights and points for discussion around the accessible user experience and any roadblocks.

Comprehensive Professional Audits

For large or highly complex sites, self audits sometimes are not feasible. In such cases, it makes sense to use professional accessibility services. Although these audits cost more, experts can work faster, provide a prioritized plan for fixes, and offer ongoing advice.

Professional audits are ideal for organizations that need significant guidance in identifying, fixing, and preventing accessibility issues.

Manual Accessibility Testing

Outside of audits, manual testing is the most powerful and accurate way to ensure your site is accessible. While there is a learning curve for tools like screen readers and other assistive tech, the investment is well worth it.

Teams should test user functionality, screen sizes, and devices using keyboard navigation, screen readers, and other assistive tech. For training, explore free resources such as the DHS Trusted Tester Program.

Automated Accessibility Testing

While not a substitute for manual testing, automated tests offer quick and scalable ways to detect common issues. These tools are useful as a first step and can accelerate manual validation.

For sites with thousands of pages or dynamic content, it’s efficient to manually test a representative sample and run automated checks on the rest.

User Acceptance Testing

UAT is a great opportunity to extend accessibility checks by exploring user flows from the perspective of individuals with disabilities. This phase goes beyond violation detection to focus on user experience.

For example, a login flow might technically pass compliance but require over 100 Tab presses—UAT could highlight this inefficiency and prompt improvements.

Accessibility Testing in Continuous Development

Accessibility testing should be integrated into your development cycle. Common triggers for testing include:

• New feature development
• Bug fixes
• Version upgrades

There are certainly more types of changes to consider accessibility testing for, but teams should think about what work is to be completed in the upcoming sprint and how it could impact the accessible state of the site. After some experience with their specific architecture, the team might discover that back-end database changes have low risk of accessibility issues, while new interactive features and forms have much higher risk. Teams can use this experience to plan time for accessibility testing accordingly and only plan to do full manual accessibility testing if warranted.