Manual Website Testing
While you can understand everything there is to know about digital accessibility, you can still miss things when building a website. This is why accessibility testing is so important. Services exist that will test your website for accessibility, like WebAIM’s WAVE tool. However, as good as they are, automated testing cannot catch every accessibility issue. They can also be costly, or take more time than you’d like. You can use them as a starting point, but make sure to still manually check your content.
How to Manually Test
Below is a simplified list of things to check. If you’d like a more in-depth, detailed reference, you can read WebAIM’s Evaluation Quick Reference and WCAG Checklist.
Zoom In
Test that when you zoom in, your website is still formatted in an easily readable way. This means that everything zooms in, nothing overlaps, and nothing resizes in a way that makes horizontal scrolling necessary.
Zoom in to 200% and scroll around on your website. Is it still usable? Make note of any problem spots.
Keyboard Check
Test that you can navigate your website with a keyboard as well as you could with a mouse. This means that keyboard navigation happens in a logical and intentional manner, all interactive elements can be accessed with the Tab key, and there are no keyboard traps.
To learn more about keyboard navigation, check out our page on keyboard accessibility.
Make sure that there is a “Skip to content” button at the beginning of the page, every interactive element has a focus indicator with good color contrast, and that you can close or back out of anything you open.
Screen Reader Test
Turn on a screen reader, and make sure it reads your website in a logical way and doesn’t exclude anything.
If you haven’t used a screen reader before, you can find some tutorials here:
Does a screen reader catch everything on the website? Can you navigate around with it?
Colors
There are two things to check here:
- Do your visual elements have good color contrast?
You can learn more about what constitutes good color contrast and some tools that you can use to test it at Color and Accessibility. - Are there any places where color is the only thing that provides information?
Make sure that color isn’t the only thing used to convey information - use texture, words, or symbols as well.
Captions
For videos that you have created, make sure you have quality captions, not just auto-captions. If you’re linking videos that you haven’t created yourself, try to find options that have captions. Then test your embedded video player, and check that it is easy to turn on captions.
Flashing Media
Make sure that your website doesn’t have any autoplaying content that could induce seizures (flashing 3 or more times per second). If you have any flashing content, turn off autoplay and add a flash warning.
Ensure that there is always an option to pause or entirely stop auto-playing/animated content as well.
Readability
This is perhaps the least urgent tenet, but it is still important.
Unless there is a specific reason for your writing to be high-level, consider lowering it to a 9th-grade reading level. There are many tools out there that can test this based on different metrics, including the Readability Scoring System.
In addition to watching the words and sentence lengths you use, consider the organization of information. Do you use clear headings to separate ideas? Do your ideas in writing flow into each other?
More information and recommendations for this can be found in W3’s How to Meet WCAG Guide.
How Often Should I Test?
Every time you make significant changes to a website page, you should do an accessibility test. If your content is constantly changing, you should test your website at least once a month.