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Accessibility Audit

Section 5.38 of The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 Code of Practice recommends that you carry out an audit of your website to identify any accessibility issues. Creo can audit your website against any of the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) Guidelines.

Our audit is primarily intended to confirm a site is accessible, or justifying to senior management that a site will need work to make it more accessible, and detailing the work necessary to make the site compliant.

What is Included in the Webstie Accessibilty Audit?

We begin with a general usability assessment of the entire site. The usability assessment is carried out to our in-house usability standard which rates sites in the following areas:

  • Download time - How long does the useful information and navigation take to download?
  • Transparency - Does the user quickly understand what is available on the website?
  • Functionality - Can your visitors perform tasks quickly with the minimum of thought?
  • Navigation - Is the system of navigation consistent throughout the site and does it allow the visitor to easily navigate to a page of interest from any page on the site (most of your visitors will follow links to your site from search engines - they will not necessarily start from the home page).
  • Feedback - Is the user helped through complex tasks with helpful pointers on what to do next?

Compatability Testing with Alternative Browsers

We will view your site with the following browser combinations and report any usability issues:

Internet Explorer 4.0
Internet Explorer 5.0
Internet Explorer 5.2 (MAC)
Internet Explorer 5.5
Internet Explorer 6.0
Internet Explorer 6.0 with mouse disabled
Firefox 1.5
Safari 1.3
Safari 2.0
Mozilla 1.7.2
Opera 8.5.0
Netscape 7.0
Netscape 7.2
AOL 9
AOL 10.3.7
Konqueror 3.4.0-5
Lynx Text Browser (provides an indication of how braille and speech readers will interpret your site and also highlights where poor accessibility may be restricting search engine access to your site).

Automatic Accessibility Testing

We will carry out an automated test on each page of your site to identify any features that do not satisfy certain WAI Accessibility Guidelines. The automated test is not a substitute for expert manual testing, but it can identify very quickly whether certain checkpoints have been satisfied. We will include the results of the automatic testing in the report.

Automated Code Validation

We will validate each page of your site using the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) Validators and report any failure to meet relevant standards. Note that the validation will only be possible if your pages are correctly identified with an HTML type. Other types of code such as XHTML can also be validated.

Expert Manual Testing

Creo will audit each page on your site your site against the WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 checkpoints. There are 16 checkpoints in Level A, a further 30 checkpoints in Level AA, and 19 additional checkpoints in Level AAA. A full list of checkpoints can be found on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) website under checklist of checkpoints for web content accessibility guidelines.
Reporting

You will receive a detailed report describing failure to meet any of the WAI checkpoints. The report will include advice on how you could modify your site to meet those checkpoints.

We will report any failure to meet recognised standards of HTML or CSS coding together with recommendations about how the coding could be modified to comply with the standards.

We will report any usability issues and any difficulties we found in viewing your site with the different browser combinations. We will suggest ways in which those issues may be resolved.

Accessibilty Audit Prices

The cost of the audit will depend on the number of pages to be assessed and whether the site is being audited against WAI level A, level AA, or level AAA guidelines. All of the different tests illustrated above are included in Level A, AA, and AAA audits, however the scope of Expert Manual Testing will vary between the different audits.

Each page will be manually assessed against each of these checkpoints, and any failure to comply with the guidelines will be reported together with recommendations on how the issue may be resolved.