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UX Atlas
Plate FLOW·012 · WorkflowGrid A4 · Rev. 2026-08-14

Accessibility Audit

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

WorkflowCraft conventionAdvanced

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 plate
  1. 1Definition
  2. 2A workable audit process
  3. 3Local chart
  4. 4Continue from here

Reach for this when

  • Establishing a baseline.
  • Before a release with legal or contractual accessibility requirements.
  • Producing an accessibility statement.

Common mistakes

  • Relying on automated results.
  • Auditing pages rather than flows.
  • Findings with no severity or remediation.
  • No retest after fixes.

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.

Local chart

FLOW·012 · Region V · Grid A4

This entry and the entries it is stated to connect with. Each line is labelled with what the connection means.

UX Audit ReportTPL·009 · OFTEN USED WITHAccessibility InsightsTOOL·033 · OFTEN USED WITHaxe DevToolsTOOL·029 · OFTEN USED WITHLighthouseTOOL·031 · OFTEN USED WITHNVDATOOL·035 · OFTEN USED WITHVoiceOverTOOL·036 · OFTEN USED WITHWAVETOOL·030 · OFTEN USED WITHAccessibility ChecklistCHK·002 · CHECK YOUR WORKUX Audit ChecklistCHK·008 · CHECK YOUR WORKWCAGTERM·073 · SHORT DEFINITIONKeyboard NavigationA11Y·002 · RELATED CONCEPTScreen ReadersA11Y·005 · RELATED CONCEPT

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.

  • WCAGTERM·073 · Term

Related concept

Connected closely enough to change how you apply this.