Website Accessibility Audit: What They Reveal And How We Fix Them
Ensure Your Website is Inclusive, Compliant, and User-Friendly
In today’s digital world, a website’s accessibility isn’t optional — it’s essential. Whether you’re running a small business or managing a large enterprise site, making your website accessible means opening the digital doors to everyone, including users with disabilities. It’s also a growing legal requirement.
But accessibility isn’t always obvious. Many violations hide in plain sight — behind a missing image alt tag, a confusing link label, or a color scheme that excludes low-vision users. That’s where an accessibility audit comes in. An accessibility audit helps identify and overcome accessibility barriers such as poor color contrast, lack of text alternatives for images, and absence. of captions on videos. By addressing these barriers, you ensure equal access to online resources and comply with legal standards.
Introduction to Digital Accessibility
Digital accessibility is the practice of making digital products, such as websites, mobile applications, and other digital technologies, accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This means ensuring that web content is accessible to individuals with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive disabilities. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a comprehensive set of guidelines for ensuring web accessibility. By adhering to these guidelines, businesses, and organizations can create accessible websites and digital products that offer equal access to information and opportunities for people with disabilities. Embracing digital accessibility fosters inclusivity, helps meet legal requirements, and enhances brand reputation.
Understanding Accessibility Fundamentals
Understanding accessibility fundamentals is crucial for creating accessible digital products. This involves recognizing the different types of disabilities, such as visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments. It also includes familiarizing oneself with the various assistive technologies that people with disabilities use to access digital content, such as screen readers, voice recognition software, and other tools. By gaining a solid understanding of these fundamentals, businesses and organizations can design and develop digital products that cater to the needs of people with disabilities, ensuring that their digital offerings are accessible and inclusive.
How We Identify Accessibility Issues
We start by thoroughly scanning your site using a mix of evaluation tools, automated tools, browser-based testing, and manual checks to reveal both surface-level and deeply embedded issues.
Here are the tools we rely on:
- Google Lighthouse: A widely trusted tool that runs audits in your browser. It flags issues like contrast ratios, alt text, and proper ARIA usage.
- Stark: A powerful design accessibility tool that helps test contrast levels and semantic structure directly in the design phase or live UI.
- BrowserStack allows us to simulate how your website performs across multiple devices and browsers, including screen readers and other assistive tech. Conducting quick accessibility tests on real devices ensures user-friendliness for visually impaired visitors.
- Manual QA: We don’t stop at automation. Our team manually reviews keyboard navigation, focus management, semantic roles, and logical heading order.
This hybrid approach ensures nothing slips through the cracks — especially the complex issues automated tools can’t catch.
Common Accessibility Issues We Find
While every site is different, many accessibility issues are surprisingly consistent. Here are some of the most common violations we encounter:
1. Improper Heading Structure
Web pages should follow a logical heading hierarchy. Skipping from an <h1> to an <h4>, or using headings purely for visual style, disrupts screen reader users and search engines.
2. Missing or Misused Alt Text
Images without alt attributes or text alternatives (or with vague ones like “image123”) are inaccessible to users relying on screen readers. Worse, decorative images that should be skipped may be read aloud unnecessarily.
3. Non-Descriptive Links
Repeated use of "Click here" or having multiple links with the same destination but different texts — or worse, same texts but different destinations — creates confusion for both screen readers and users with cognitive impairments.
4. Color Contrast Failures
Poor contrast between text and background can make the content unreadable, especially for users with low vision or color blindness. Tools like Stark help us flag and fix these instantly.
5. Unlabeled Form Inputs
Inputs without associated <label> elements (or ones that rely on placeholders) are virtually invisible to assistive technologies. Forms are one of the most critical interactive elements and often the most neglected.
6. Icon-only buttons and Missing Semantics
Interactive elements that lack accessible names or rely solely on visual icons cause problems for users relying on assistive technology, such as screen readers. Every interactive element should be discoverable and understandable.
7. Keyboard Navigation Traps
If a user can’t move through your site using the keyboard alone — or gets stuck in a modal or menu — that’s a major accessibility failure. We use manual testing to validate tab order, skip links, and focus states to fix this.
8. Missing Page Language
If your HTML doesn’t include a lang attribute, screen readers may mispronounce words or read content incorrectly.
9. ARIA Misuse
While ARIA attributes can enhance accessibility, overuse or incorrect application often does more harm than good. We make sure ARIA roles support — not break — accessibility.
10. Demo and Placeholder Content
During audits, we flag stock images, placeholders, and "Lorem Ipsum" content that slipped through QA — not just for accessibility but for professionalism and clarity.
Designing for Accessibility
Designing for accessibility is an essential step in creating accessible digital products. This involves considering the needs of people with disabilities, such as those with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments, from the beginning of the development process. Rather than retrofitting accessibility features later on, it is more effective to integrate accessibility into the design phase. This proactive approach ensures that digital products are usable by everyone, regardless of their abilities. By prioritizing accessibility in the design process, businesses and organizations can create digital products that are not only compliant with accessibility guidelines but also provide a better user experience for all users.
How We Fix These Issues (Code-Based Remediation)
Once we identify issues, our team remediates them directly in the codebase. Here’s what that looks like:
- Headings: We rewrite heading levels for semantic accuracy without affecting visual styling.
- Images: We add descriptive alt text or program fallbacks when missing — like using the post title if the image alt text isn’t set.
- Links: We ensure all links with identical destinations use identical link text — a common violation that’s often overlooked.
- Contrast: We update text and background colors in CSS to meet or exceed WCAG 2.1 AA contrast thresholds.
- Forms: We pair every input with a visible and programmatically connected label, using for attributes and aria-labelledby as needed.
- Icons and Buttons: We wrap icon-only buttons with accessible names via aria-label, or better yet, include real text alongside icons.
- Focus Management: We restore focus outlines, add skip links, and correct tab order issues to ensure smooth keyboard navigation.
- Language Tags: We set proper lang attributes (< html lang=”en”>) to help screen readers interpret the page.
- ARIA Cleanup: We simplify ARIA roles and remove unnecessary attributes, especially in overly complex frontend frameworks.
Enhancing User Experience
Enhancing user experience is a critical aspect of creating accessible digital products. This involves ensuring that digital products are easy to use, navigate, and understand, regardless of the user’s abilities. Key elements include providing alternative text for images, closed audio and video content captions, and other accessibility features that make digital products more usable for people with disabilities. By focusing on enhancing user experience, businesses and organizations can create digital products that are accessible and usable and provide equal access to information and opportunities for people with disabilities. Additionally, improving user experience can enhance the overall usability of digital products, making them more appealing to a broader range of users.
Why Accessibility Is Ongoing
Accessibility isn’t a one-time checklist. Every content update, plugin, or redesign has the potential to reintroduce accessibility errors — especially on WordPress and other CMS-driven sites. That’s why we recommend periodic accessibility audits and training for internal teams or content editors to ensure ongoing accessibility compliance.
Critical Issues to Prioritize
While we aim for full compliance, some accessibility problems are more impactful than others. Here are the items we consider critical in any remediation:
- Non-descriptive or duplicate link text
- Missing or irrelevant alt text
- Broken or missing keyboard navigation
- Low color contrast ratios
- Unlabeled form fields
If your site has any of the above, it’s essential to resolve them quickly for legal compliance and user experience.
The Value of Proactive Accessibility
A well-audited and remediated site doesn’t just meet WCAG guidelines — it becomes a more accessible website:
- More discoverable by search engines (yes, accessibility helps SEO!)
- More usable by all users, regardless of ability
- More compliant with ADA, Section 508, and other regulations
- More trustworthy to your visitors and customers
Ready to Audit Your Site?
We help brands uncover and fix website accessibility issues before they lead to complaints, lost users, or legal action. Whether you’re looking to improve your website or need to remediate known violations proactively, our team is here to help.
Schedule a Free Accessibility Audit Consultation
Contact us today to discuss your site’s accessibility, health, and compliance readiness.
