Accessibility
How to run an accessibility audit
Run an automated scanner to catch the mechanical failures, then test with a keyboard and a screen reader for the ones no tool can detect. Automated tools find roughly a third of real issues; the rest need a person.
Before you start
- A browser with axe DevTools or Lighthouse
- A screen reader — NVDA or VoiceOver, both free
The steps
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Step 1: Run an automated scan
axe DevTools or Lighthouse on your key templates. Fix everything it reports first — these are unambiguous.
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Step 2: Unplug the mouse
Tab through every page. You must be able to reach and operate everything, and always see where focus is.
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Step 3: Check focus visibility
A visible focus ring on every interactive element. Removing outlines without a replacement is a WCAG failure.
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Step 4: Test forms without a mouse
Complete the whole form by keyboard. Confirm errors are announced, not only shown in red.
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Step 5: Check colour contrast
4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text and interface components. Measure rather than judge by eye.
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Step 6: Turn on a screen reader
Navigate by headings, then by links. Both lists should make sense read aloud in isolation.
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Step 7: Zoom to 200%
Nothing should be cut off, overlap, or require horizontal scrolling.
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Step 8: Test with reduced motion on
Animation should respect the prefers-reduced-motion setting rather than ignoring it.
What automated tools cannot see
Whether alt text is accurate, whether headings describe the sections beneath them, whether a keyboard user can escape a modal, whether error messages are useful. Every one of these is a real barrier and none produce an automated failure.
The overlap with SEO is not a coincidence
Heading structure, link text, alt text and semantic markup are how both a screen reader and a crawler understand the page. Fixing accessibility improves how machines read your site, because they read it the same way.
The background behind this
Website accessibility, without the compliance theatre covers the reasoning in about 5 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.