The Disability Community has spoken out about these tools saying they often make their experiences more difficult instead of helping. It’s always better to develop a website accessibly rather than to use an overlay widget or add on accessibility at the end, like a coat of paint. Building accessible websites is a goal that all web developers should strive to meet in every web project, because it makes the web more inclusive and usable. Using these techniques allows me to truly understand why the WCAG guidelines are in place instead of making updates to code that I don’t understand.Īfter making the updates, I can check my work to see if it’s more usable with the assistive technology.

I find using these techniques combined with an understanding of all WCAG guidelines makes the audit process much easier, faster, and more intuitive.

Now, I audit websites by seeing if it’s possible to navigate and complete tasks using a keyboard only as someone with a different level of motor skills might, and with a screen reader, as someone who is visually impaired might. It’s a helpful start, but it doesn’t show you how a disabled user would actually use the web, and sometimes it is not accurate. From the accessibility audit tool WAVE by. A key user experience design principle is to have empathy for the users who will be using your products and to understand their experience, so I thought that a better way to audit websites for accessibility issues would be to use the websites with the same techniques a disabled user might. But I found the issues were abstract and hard to parse. Why use assistive technology yourself when conducting a usability audit? When I first started doing these audits, I would use tools that attempted to scan a website and point out accessibility issues. The Problem with Automated Accessibility Scans People in the web design industry should know how easy and helpful it is to audit the accessibility of the websites we make by using our keyboards and screen readers, so in this article I’ll aim to explain how you can get started.

These guidelines lay out techniques for making accessible websites. You can access a direct transcript using the captions feature in the video player.Īt ExpandTheRoom, we often help audit our client’s websites for compliance with WCAG, which is the web content accessibility guidelines.

Note, the following is a transcript of the video above adapted for reading.

Website accessibility screen reader