Accessibility Audit: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Expect

An accessibility audit is a structured review of your product to find where people get blocked.

That includes things like keyboard navigation, screen reader support, color contrast, and how forms behave in real use. It's not just whether something exists, but whether it works.

Most teams don’t think about accessibility until something breaks. A customer gets stuck. A compliance requirement shows up. A feature works for some users but not others.

An audit makes those gaps visible.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how accessibility audits actually work, what they include, and what teams usually get back at the end.

What does it mean to have an accessible web app?

Web accessibility means your app works for people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, and motor impairments.

But accessibility isn’t something you can bolt on at the end. If it wasn’t considered from the beginning, the only way to understand where things break is to test it intentionally.

What is an accessibility audit?

An accessibility audit is an extensive review of the usability of your website, web app, or web product for people with disabilities. It tests many aspects, including keyboard navigation, how the site functions with a screen reader, color contrast, proper labeling of images, and much more.

An accessibility audit can help ensure your website is accessible to all users, creating a more inclusive and user-friendly experience. An accessibility audit can also help protect your company from potential legal challenges if people cannot properly access the information on your site.

Why does your web app need an accessibility audit?

There are an estimated 1.3 billion people in the world with a significant disability. However, disabilities can also be conditional or temporary, like a broken arm, a loud restaurant, a harsh glare, or being unable to speak the local language. These are all examples of when someone may benefit from accessible practices.

If it’s way too laborious to accomplish what someone’s trying to do with your web app, one of two things could happen:

• People will give up and look elsewhere
• Or they’ll push through and have a horrible experience

Accessibility levels the playing field so everyone can use what you’ve built without friction.

What standards should an accessibility audit test against?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard should be followed to ensure you have an accessible website. All of the guidelines lined out here are in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards as well. Each section of your site will be tested against these standards.

What's included in the scope of an accessibility audit?

Different agencies will offer different types and scopes of tests. For example, at Planet Argon, we’ll have a consultation with you first to determine your needs. Then we’ll identify different sections or pages that need to be tested.

If you run a site with an extensive catalog of products, only one of your product pages will need to be tested- the recommended changes would then apply to every other page. Likewise, the same process would go for any section or pages that are structurally the same but have different content. This way, we don’t have to run every single page through our automated and manual testing procedure.

How accessibility audits are tested

There are two types of testing- automated and manual.

Automated tests can give you a lot of good information and check off many parts of the WCAG that need testing. Automated tests catch a lot; but they can't catch everything. Many things still need to be checked by an actual human and navigated as another real human using it.

One of the most important tests is to navigate your site only with the keyboard. This is how folks with limited motor skills or vision impairments may navigate your site. Other manual tests include checking for text contrast on images, reviewing headings and content, using forms, ensuring images are correctly labeled, etc.

We also test using the built-in screen reader for macOS. This gives us a good idea of how your website performs using only the keyboard and a screen reader.

Accessibility Testing Includes...

Screen Readers

Screen Readers use special software or devices to read websites or web apps to people using the internet, and anyone with a visual impairment can use them to use your site without physically looking at it. This includes navigating the site, reading image descriptions, and reading content.

You know those pesky alt-text prompts that always show up in your web crawls/scans? Those aren’t just for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. Screen readers read those to help users understand the concept of the image. So instead of just filling those with keywords, use that space to describe the image in a way that will help people using a screen reader to understand what’s being shown.

Keyboard Navigation

Keyboard navigation can be used by people with a visual impairment or those with limited motor skills who cannot accurately use a pointing device like a mouse. It can also be a fast way for everyone to navigate parts of your site.

For example, if you have a form that is appropriately accessible, your visitors can quickly use the tab key to navigate between the fields of that form instead of moving and clicking a mouse. An accessibility audit will ensure your website is correctly set up to be navigated by a keyboard only.

Closed Captions

If you have video content on your website, you should have closed captions for users who may be hearing impaired. This is also helpful for conditional situations we mentioned above- a loud space, no speakers on a computer or device, etc.

Color Contrast

Color contrast is very important to make your site or web app easily readable by people with limited vision or color blindness. The goal is to ensure the text has a good contrast ratio against its background color.

This can also apply to text over images. You’ll want to ensure that an image has high transparency and bold text if you cover one with the other or ensure there’s a good contrast between the two.

Text-Zoom

Your website should perform well when the text is zoomed up to 200%. Increasing the text size should not cause content to overlap.

What to do with your accessibility audit report

So you have received your Accessibility Audit Report, now what? First, we’ll review this report with you and describe what each line item means for your website or application. We’ll also provide a list of urgent and non-urgent action items so they can be prioritized. Then, you can take this information and plan how to tackle these issues going forward. We can also help you understand future priorities when building or adding to your app so that accessibility is a part of the design process from the get-go.

Doesn’t that feel good?

Once your website is revised, you’re not just checking a box. You’re removing friction for real people using your app every day.

Our Accessibility Audit gives you a clear picture of what's working, what isn't, and what to fix first.

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