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Accessibility Audit

A structured assessment against WCAG, combining automated tooling with the manual testing that finds most real problems.

Definition

An accessibility audit evaluates a product against defined success criteria. Automated tools catch a minority of issues; the majority require manual testing with keyboard and assistive technology.

Craft convention. True because the industry converged on it. Breaking it costs familiarity, not correctness.

On this page
  1. Definition
  2. A workable audit process
  3. Continue from here

A workable audit process

  1. 1

    Define scope

    Which pages, which flows, which conformance level, which assistive technology pairings.

  2. 2

    Run automated tooling

    axe, Lighthouse or equivalent. This finds contrast, missing labels, landmark and ARIA misuse quickly.

  3. 3

    Keyboard pass

    Complete every flow with no mouse. This finds most operability failures.

  4. 4

    Screen reader pass

    At least one desktop and one mobile pairing on the primary flows.

  5. 5

    Zoom and reflow pass

    400 percent zoom, and 200 percent text-only zoom.

  6. 6

    Cognitive and content pass

    Language clarity, error recovery, timeouts, consistent help.

  7. 7

    Report with severity and location

    Criterion, what fails, where, and a concrete remediation.

Continue from here

Each link says what the connection is, so you can tell a principle from an alternative from a thing people mix this up with.

Often used with

These usually appear in the same screen or the same decision.

Check your work

Review passes that test whether this was done properly.

Short definition

The one-paragraph version, for when that is all you need.

Related concept

Connected closely enough to change how you apply this.