How to Run an Accessibility Audit
Try a small experiment. Open your own website, then put your mouse to one side and don't touch it. Use only the keyboard — press the Tab key to move around, Enter to activate things. Can you reach the menu? Fill in the contact form? Get through a purchase? For a great many websites, the honest answer is no, you get stuck somewhere obvious, trapped on a page with no clear way forward. And if you cannot navigate your own site with a keyboard, neither can the millions of people who rely on exactly that, every single day.
An accessibility audit is simply the act of finding out who your website shuts out, and how. It is not a niche, technical concern for a tiny minority. A significant share of people experience some form of disability, and many more benefit from accessible design in ordinary situations — bright sunlight on a screen, a noisy room, a broken arm, getting older. In this guide you will learn what accessibility really means, how to run a practical audit without being an expert, what tools can help, and how to fix the most common problems. The goal is a site that welcomes everyone, which is good for people and good for business.
What accessibility actually means
Accessibility means building your website so that people with a wide range of abilities can use it. That includes people who are blind or have low vision and use a screen reader — software that reads a page aloud. It includes people who cannot use a mouse and navigate by keyboard or voice. It includes people who are deaf and need captions, people with colour blindness who cannot tell red from green, and people with cognitive differences who need clear, simple layouts. It is, in short, about not accidentally locking people out of something you would happily let them in to.
The crucial word is "accidentally." Almost no one builds an inaccessible site on purpose. It happens through small, unexamined choices: text that is too pale to read, an image with no description, a form field with no label, a video with no captions, a button you can only reach with a mouse. Each one quietly excludes someone. An audit shines a light on these choices so you can put them right, and turns good intentions into a site that genuinely works for everyone. It pairs naturally with ongoing accessibility maintenance, because a site can slip back out of shape as it changes.
Why an audit is worth your time
Set aside the moral case for a moment, compelling as it is, because accessibility is also plainly good for business. An accessible site reaches more customers — you are no longer turning away a meaningful slice of your potential audience at the door. It tends to be easier for everyone to use, not just people with disabilities, because the same things that help a screen reader — clear structure, good labels, readable text — help everyone. It often overlaps with better search performance too, since search engines value the same clean structure that assistive technology relies on.
There is also a rising expectation, in many places and many industries, that websites should be accessible, with real consequences for those that are not. But the best reason is simpler than any of these. Excluding someone from your business because of a design choice you never examined is not the kind of thing most owners want to do once they realise it is happening. An audit is how you find out. It fits naturally alongside a broader website health audit as part of looking after your site properly.
The four pillars of accessible design
The internationally recognised approach to accessibility rests on four simple ideas, and you do not need to memorise any standard to keep them in mind. A site should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Those words sound formal, but they translate into very human questions.
| Pillar | The plain-language question | A common failure |
|---|---|---|
| Perceivable | Can people sense the content? | Images with no text description |
| Operable | Can people use it without a mouse? | Menus only reachable by mouse |
| Understandable | Is it clear and predictable? | Confusing forms and error messages |
| Robust | Does it work with assistive tech? | Custom widgets screen readers can't read |
If you keep returning to those four questions as you test, you will catch the great majority of problems without ever needing to read a technical specification. For a gentle grounding in the principles, the basics of web accessibility are a good companion to this audit.
How to run the audit yourself
A useful accessibility audit combines two things: automated tools that scan for technical problems, and manual checks that catch the human ones machines miss. Neither is enough alone. Tools are fast and thorough at what they can measure, but they cannot tell whether your page actually makes sense to a person. Here is a practical sequence anyone can follow.
Start with a free automated scan
Several free tools will scan a page and flag accessibility issues — low colour contrast, missing image descriptions, form fields without labels and more. They are an excellent first pass that surfaces many problems in seconds, and they explain each issue in plain terms. Run one on your most important pages: the home page, a key product or service page, the contact page, and the checkout if you have one. Treat the report as a starting map, not the whole territory.
Do the keyboard test
This is the experiment from the opening, and it is one of the most revealing checks you can do. Put the mouse away and navigate using only the Tab key to move, Enter and the spacebar to activate. Can you reach everything? Can you see where you are as you move — is there a visible highlight on the current item? Can you open the menu, complete the form, finish a purchase? Anywhere you get stuck or lost is a place real keyboard users get stuck too.
Listen with a screen reader
Most computers and phones include a built-in screen reader you can switch on. Turn it on, close your eyes for a moment, and try to use your site by ear. It is a humbling, eye-opening experience. You will quickly hear where images are unlabelled ("image, image, image"), where buttons are nameless, and where the page structure is so jumbled it makes no sense aloud. You do not need to be an expert listener; even a few minutes reveals the worst barriers.
Check colour and text by eye
Finally, look at your site with fresh, critical eyes. Is the text easy to read, or is it pale grey on white? Do you rely on colour alone to convey meaning — a red error with no words, a green tick with no label — which fails anyone who cannot distinguish the colours? Can the text be enlarged without the layout falling apart? These plain visual checks catch problems that affect a huge number of people.
Fixing the most common problems
The reassuring news is that the same handful of issues account for most failures, and most are straightforward to fix. Missing image descriptions are solved by adding short, meaningful alternative text to every meaningful image — a sentence describing what it shows, so a screen reader can convey it. Low contrast is fixed by darkening pale text until it is comfortably readable. Unlabelled form fields are fixed by giving every field a clear, visible label. Keyboard traps are fixed by making sure everything reachable by mouse is also reachable by keyboard.
Many of these touch the same parts of your site that affect usability and conversion, which is why accessibility work so often improves the experience for everyone. A clearly labelled, keyboard-friendly form, for instance, is both more accessible and more likely to be completed — an overlap explored in keeping your forms working and converting. Fixing accessibility is rarely wasted effort; it nearly always makes the site better for everybody.
Making accessibility a habit
An audit is a snapshot, but a website is a moving picture. Every new page, image, form or feature is a chance to introduce a fresh barrier, which is why a single audit is a beginning rather than an end. The lasting win is to weave accessibility into how you work: add alternative text whenever you add an image, check contrast whenever you choose colours, do a quick keyboard test whenever you build a new page. Small, consistent habits keep your site welcoming as it grows, and they are far easier than periodically rescuing a site that has drifted badly.
This ongoing care belongs in your regular maintenance rhythm alongside performance and security work, and it connects to the broader effort of keeping every part of your site healthy, fast and usable over time, as covered in maintaining your website's performance over time. Accessibility, performance and good design are not separate projects; they are facets of the same commitment to serving the people who visit you.
Bringing it together
An accessibility audit asks an uncomfortable but important question: who is my website quietly turning away? The answer is rarely flattering at first, because almost every site contains barriers that no one put there on purpose. But the path from there is encouraging. A free automated scan, a keyboard test, a few minutes with a screen reader and an honest look at your colours will surface the great majority of problems, and most fixes are simple. Make those checks a habit rather than a one-off, and your site becomes a place that welcomes everyone — which is the right thing to do, and happens to be good business too. If you would like help auditing or improving your site's accessibility, you are welcome to get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be technical to run an accessibility audit?+
Are automated tools enough on their own?+
What are the most common accessibility problems?+
How often should I check my site's accessibility?+
References
- World Wide Web Consortium. "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)." w3.org.
- WebAIM. "Accessibility Evaluation and the WebAIM Million Report." webaim.org.
- World Health Organization. "Disability and Health." who.int.