ADA Honest Discussion: Websites and Manual Accessibility Audits

Lynn Wehrman: Welcome everyone to the ADA Honest Discussion Series, Real Organizations Finding Their Way. This session is focused on websites and manual accessibility audits. My name is Lynn Wehrman, President, Founder, and CEO of Digital Accessibility by WeCo — a digital accessibility company that puts the skills and talents of people with disabilities to work for your websites as subject matter experts and digital accessibility guides.

Lynn Wehrman: Website audits are a hot topic right now with the ADA web rules. They’re usually the starting point for most organizations to discover how inaccessible their website is and what they need to do to make it accessible. We wanted to get together a group of people who are right in the thick of it, working on digital accessibility for their government agencies.

Alex Carlson: My name is Alex Carlson. I’m the Public Affairs Manager for the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District, based in Saint Paul — we serve the seven counties throughout the Twin Cities. We just completed a manual accessibility audit and are in the stages of working on making the fixes so that we can be compliant.

Ryan Roop: Hi, I’m Ryan Roop, Digital Media and Marketing Specialist for the City of Eagan, Minnesota. We also just completed our first manual audit and are in the stage of taking care of some of those corrections.

Brian: Hi, I’m Brian. I’m a Senior Accessibility Specialist and have been working with WeCo for a couple of years now. I typically work with the more technical aspects of the auditing process, working directly with the auditors. I’m also certified with the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.

Lynn Wehrman: Website accessibility has been a push and pull between AI, dashboards, algorithms, and accessibility overlays that companies put on websites to claim it makes them accessible. But where the court system has been for many years — and our company has worked with three different prominent law firms on helping their clients make their websites accessible — the DOJ has really centered their efforts on this: the only way to determine for legal purposes whether a website is accessible or not is through a manual audit. Our process was actually developed with a law firm back in 2016 and 2017, so we’ve been doing audits for a long time.

Brian: A manual accessibility audit tests your website against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG — an internationally accepted standard for testing websites and other digital properties like PDFs. It consists of roughly 80 success criteria, split into A and AA categories. The A category covers the absolutely essential requirements. If you can reach AA, you’re in great shape. The AAA criteria are quite difficult to achieve and not strictly necessary for most organizations.

Brian: During an audit, the auditor tests your site against these standards using several methods. They’ll use the keyboard alone to make sure everything that is interactive can be accessed and completed without a mouse. They’ll check color contrast using tools that measure the ratio between text and background colors. They’ll turn on a screen reader and go through the site just like someone who relies on one — listening to make sure that headings, buttons, links, and other elements are properly announced and make sense in context.

Brian: It’s worth noting that disability doesn’t only mean permanent disability. Every disability that affects internet use has a permanent, temporary, and situational version. For example, with color contrast — someone could have permanently poor vision, could have temporarily misplaced their glasses, or could simply be in a brightly lit environment where contrast matters. Manual audits account for this full range of users.

Lynn Wehrman: The only way to determine for legal purposes whether a website is accessible is through a manual audit. Automated scans and overlays can identify some issues, but they can’t replace a human auditor testing real user interactions. That’s why we developed our audit process with a law firm, and it’s why the courts look to manual audits as the standard.

Alex Carlson: The conversation after the accessibility audit shines such a brighter light on the actual issues. With an automated scan, it can find errors, but it doesn’t explain what the issue is or why it matters. With a manual accessibility audit, you don’t just get the what — you get the why and the how, so you know how to fix it and understand why it needs to be addressed in the first place.

Ryan Roop: When you break it down, a pair of glasses is assistive technology. It helps people understand and put themselves in somebody else’s shoes. There’s a level of empathy involved — understanding that not every person perceives the world in the same way. Everybody knows somebody living with a disability. When you ask folks to stop and think about that person in their life, that really helps drive the point home.

Alex Carlson: When we started actually looking at what a user experience is, we came up with scenarios we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise. Maybe a family doesn’t have money for a computer and is accessing the website through a PlayStation or another device that requires keyboard access because they can only tab through. When you do a manual audit, you’re getting that real user experience — not just a list of requirements on paper, but understanding how it’s actually affecting people. Even something like using simple language instead of jargon — there are disabilities where that matters, and making information digestible to as many people as possible meets the user where they’re at.

Brian: For organizations without the expertise or budget to hire an expert, one simple thing you can do is start pressing the Tab key. You should be able to see what item currently has focus and interact with it the same way you would with a mouse — activating links, opening navigation menus, and so on. You can also drag your browser window to a narrow width to test whether your content reflows correctly on a small screen, the way it would on a phone. These things can go a long way toward improving accessibility without requiring special equipment or certification.

Lynn Wehrman: If you focus more on the function of the site — using WCAG as guidance but thinking from the user perspective — you can bring that list of criteria down to size. You don’t necessarily have to worry about A-level criteria, which takes about 20 or so off the list. Also consider what kind of content is on the page. The lower-numbered success criteria mostly relate to audio and video content, so if a page has none, you don’t need to check those either.

Lynn Wehrman: Thank you so much to Alex Carlson, Public Affairs Manager for the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District; Ryan Roop, Digital Media and Marketing Specialist for the City of Eagan; and Brian, Senior Accessibility Specialist here at WeCo. It’s really important to get people together so they can share ideas. Our next ADA Honest Discussion is coming up on June 24th, focused on accessible social media. We look forward to seeing you all next time. And remember — it’s a gift, not a delay.