Partially and with caveats. There are many automated tools to help you test your website for accessibility, but they won’t provide a complete picture because some accessibility issues cannot be identified by automated testing.
While automated tests only cover about 20–30% of issues, it’s a good start to get a feel for the kind of accessibility issues your website has, and there are automated tests that you can perform yourself. Plan to iteratively fix any issues that come up.
Tools for automated accessibility tests
Browser-based tools for testing accessibility examine the static code behind a web page, as rendered by the browser. Popular free tools include:
- WAVE, which includes checks for compliance issues found in the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2). Icons and colour coding are used to highlight errors, contrast problems, and other accessibility-related issues. It gives a summary of the issues it finds and why they matter. We wrote a blog post about using WAVE to identify common accessibility issues to help you get started.
- axe DevTools is available as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. It also checks a web page for accessibility issues, testing against WCAG 2.2 and best practice recommendations.
- Microsoft Accessibility Insights helps identify accessibility issues found in an earlier version of WCAG (WCAG 2.1). In addition to automated checks, it also provides step-by-step instructions, examples, and how-to-fix guidance for a number of “assisted” manual tests.
Depending on how confident you are with technology, the results from these tools may be hard to understand and seem overwhelming. If that’s the case, they still make a good starting point for a conversation with your web development agency.
Manual testing
The tools above don’t interact with a web page like a real human, so they cannot tell if someone is likely to get stuck when navigating a web page using their keyboard. They also lack the context to be able to spot whether a heading is being used appropriately or just to make some text look bigger. Manual testing is a vital complement to automated tests for the full picture of accessibility on your website.
W3C – the organisation behind the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – has a primer on how to perform some quick and easy accessibility checks to help you start manually assessing a web page, including keyboard checks.
Unless you already have a screen reader set up and know how to use it, don’t worry too much about starting manual accessibility testing with one. Different screen readers can behave very differently when used with different devices and browsers. Accessibility is about more than screen readers, and testing with a keyboard will reveal a far greater range of potential issues.
Manual testing with real users
You may be surprised to learn that it’s possible to build a website that technically meets WCAG and yet is still inaccessible to some people.
The only way you’ll know for sure if your website is accessible in practice is to include manual testing by people who have accessibility needs or who rely on assistive technology on a day-to-day basis. You may discover that people are using your website in unforeseen ways!
Improve accessibility on your website
We offer a single-page accessibility review. This high-level review checks for the presence of ten different types of accessibility issues, using a combination of automated tools and manual tests. The report gives you a good understanding of the sort of accessibility issues present across your website and a foundation for making improvements.
We also work with testing partners Zoonou and Digital Accessibility Centre to provide full, professional accessibility audits.