How to generate a website accessibility report?
What is the best way to check a website's WCAG 2.1 accessibility standard? I want to generate a report if a website's accessibility is of a AA WCAG 2.1 standard.
Producing such report is called an accessibility audit.
For the way to check, the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0 is the relevant standard, which is part of the WCAG 2.
It describes how to proceed in an audit:
- Define the Evaluation Scope
- Explore the Target Website
- Select a Representative Sample
- Audit the Selected Sample
- Report the Evaluation Findings
Further, there is guidance on involving users and using evaluation tools, both of which are optional for conformance with the EM.
For most people, it’s impossible to evaluate all success criteria without using a tool.
There a plenty of spreadsheet solutions out there that help with the evaluation, some governments providing spreadsheets based on their national adoption of the WCAG.
The Web Accessibility Initiative created their own, simple WCAG-EM Report Tool, and then there are several commercial solutions.
In my opinion, the following criteria matter:
Combine automatic and manual testing
Only a smaller part of a site’s performance can be checked automatically, so you’d need a tool that guides you through the manual parts as well.
Ideally, the automatic parts would already be covered and taken into account.
Avoid re-evaluation of common components
Modern sites, especially web applications, are constructed component-based, with components re-appearing on each page. These are based on the exact same code and will behave the same across pages. Like header, navigation and footer.
A page-based evaluation is therefore not very practical.
An ideal tool™ would take into account that these exist and re-use the component’s evaluation for each page that includes the component.
Tools that provide these features
The market leader on accessibility tools is deque with their axe suite. They offer the axe Auditor, which starts evaluation of each page with an automatic audit, and then guides the auditor through the remaining manual checks, providing a combined report at the end.