What if you can’t afford an accessibility audit?

What could you have instead of an audit?

A full-site accessibility audit following the standard WCAG-EM methodology will typically require several weeks’ work. We know this is an outlay many organisations can’t always afford. But there are other options, other approaches that can greatly contribute to improving the accessibility of your site or app.

You could commission a more high-level expert review focussing on, say, sitewide elements, important transactional pages or common content blocks that appear throughout a site. As with a full audit, you could receive the results in a written report, but this isn’t as important for more ad hoc reviews. For example, it could be that a better use of resources is in creating Jira or DevOps tickets or delivering a workshop for developers who’ll be fixing the issues, whatever works best for your organisation.

And for sites that are still being designed or developed, don’t leave it until the end of the development cycle before you think about accessibility. Commissioning accessibility reviews at key points during design and development is a good way to identify and fix errors before they become too embedded in your service, saving more costly and time-consuming remediation after go-live.

CDS have provided this sort of “light-touch” review for many organisations and often it provides the best value for limited budgets. It shouldn’t replace the need for a full audit at some point, but it can often quickly identify the most widespread barriers to accessibility.

What could you do in-house?

But what if even an expert high-level review is outside of your means? That’s no excuse to put accessibility in the Nice-to-Have box – there are plenty of things you can do in-house. CDS have supported many organisations with providing bespoke consultation and training that upskills and empowers their teams to take responsibility for accessibility and begin to bake accessibility into their processes.

It doesn’t have to take much time, money or even technical knowledge. For example, most people with reasonable digital skills can quickly learn how to test using keyboard navigation and automated browser-based test tools. The more adventurous could even begin to learn to use assistive technologies such as screen readers, speech recognition or magnifier tools.

But don’t just test your live site – in many ways that’s too late. If you’re developing new functionality, get into the habit of running these tools while you’re still in the design or development stage. It’s much easier to fix issues before they’ve gone live.

Automated testing

Studies have suggested that up to 67% of accessibility issues are introduced during the design phase, so if you’re creating new designs there’s no reason to wait until you start building them to test for accessibility. There are many automated tools for design systems, such as Figma’s Stark plugin, that will highlight potential issues at this early stage.

Get into the habit of testing pages on your live or development site with free automated browser tools like WAVE, axe DevTools and ARC Toolkit. These tools are still a long way from providing a comprehensive analysis of how accessible web content is but they are an invaluable first-stop for any test or audit process.

Generally, these tools are good at highlighting issues caused by HTML and CSS, including:

• Images without alt text
• Links and buttons without discernible text
• Colour contrast
• Form fields without programmatically linked labels
• Insufficient target size for interactive elements
• HTML and ARIA errors

Test using keyboard navigation

Many people can’t use a mouse or touchscreen, so use a computer keyboard instead. This includes people with mobility and visual impairments, including most desktop screen reader users, so it’s essential that you can interact with your site using a keyboard.

You’ll use a mixture of the Tab, Shift, Enter and Arrow keys to navigate – WebAIM have some more good and more detailed guidance – and you should soon pick it up. Hide your mouse if necessary!

Things to look out for include:

• Interactive elements you can’t activate using a keyboard.
• Missing visible indicators that tell you which interactive element you’re focused on – think about how important being able to see the cursor is for mouse navigation.
• Missing Skip to Content links at the top of each page. These enable people using keyboard navigation to save time by easily skipping over repeated sections such as main site navigation.
• Unusual and confusing order when navigating using the Tab key.

Responsive design and zoom

Responsive web design doesn’t just mean testing on mobile devices. Many people with visual impairments use a level of browser zoom which will often mean they will see the mobile or tablet view on their desktop device.

This is easy to test for by setting the browser zoom to 400% using Ctrl+ or Cmd+. Make sure the page doesn’t have a horizontal scroll bar and look out for any overlapping text, broken layouts or functionality you can’t access in this view.

Link text

People using screen readers often use a list of all links available to navigate a page, so make sure the link text describes what the link does. If you’ve used link text like “click here”, “more information” or “read more”, it will not be easy for people using screen readers to tell where these links will take them.

Learn to use some assistive technology

If you’re feeling inquisitive, learn how to perform some basic assistive technology testing. It may seem like a steep learning curve, but that’s no reason not to engage. And there are enough ways to do this without having to invest in expensive software licenses.

NVDA, a widely-used open-source screen reader, is a good entry point into assistive technology. It’s free to download, although currently only available for Windows desktop. WebAIM has some useful guidance in getting started with NVDA, including useful keyboard shortcuts.

Take a peek inside your mobile phone’s Accessibility options too. You’ll find a wealth of inbuilt tools, including screen readers, the ability to control your phone using voice, magnifiers and options to increase font size and change colours and contrast. And for iPhone you can add the out-of-the-box ability to control your phone using eye tracking and facial expressions, such as a smile or raised eyebrows.

Don’t let your budget stop you

Organisations shouldn't let budget constraints become a barrier to improving accessibility. While a full WCAG-EM audit will provide invaluable insights into technical compliance and how to achieve it, there are practical approaches to suit every budget.

The key is to start somewhere, taking action now rather than deferring accessibility improvements indefinitely.

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