4 Steps to Get Accessible
In most cases you’ll want to make significant progress, efficiently. We use these 4 steps to plan and execute our initiatives with the goal of mitigating legal risk immediately, and documenting our progress and future priorities.
1. Identify Key Content
If core features of your website are not accessible, prosecutors may have a strong legal position.
- Start by identifying key pages, content and functions.
- Group pages by purpose and importance.
- Review analytics to find your most-visited pages.
- Identify marketing campaigns and content driving the most traffic.
2. Auto-Scan Pages
Scan the content identified in Step 1 using automated tools like WAVE, Axe and ARC. Lawyers appear to prefer the WAVE tool since it is often cited in lawsuits and demand letters. That’s why we built this free tool that uses the WAVE rules engine for identifying errors.
3. Manually Audit
Automated scans will help identify about 50% of your issues. Manual auditing and testing is the only way to identify 100% of your accessibility issues. A manual audit should include hands-on testing for all of the requirements found on this checklist (minimally). But should also include texting by actual visually impaired trained technicians.
4. Remediate Issues
Remediation means eliminating accessibility barriers from your website. Scans and manual audits will guide your efforts. But applying the right fix is essential. For instance adding alt tags to images and text may eliminate the issue technically, but if text is not descriptive it doesn’t actually assist your vision-impaired visitors.