Accessibility Testing and Auditing

Accessibility testing checks whether people with disabilities can perceive, operate, and understand a digital product. An audit turns evidence from automated checks, manual interaction, assistive technology, and standards review into findings that teams can reproduce and fix.

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Accessibility Testing and Auditing

Accessibility testing examines whether disabled people can use a digital product and whether the product meets defined accessibility requirements. An accessibility audit is a structured evaluation with a stated scope, method, evidence, findings, and conclusion. Testing produces observations. Auditing connects those observations to requirements and records what was examined.

For web work, the usual requirements baseline is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG. WCAG 2.2 organizes guidance under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Its testable success criteria have levels A, AA, and AAA. A target such as “WCAG 2.2 Level AA” includes every applicable Level A and Level AA success criterion.

Conformance is broader than a passing scan. WCAG conformance applies to full pages, complete processes, and every relied-upon technology. A checkout flow cannot conform when its cart page passes but its payment step blocks keyboard use. A widget-level test is valuable regression evidence, but it is not a site-level conformance claim.

The evaluation system

An effective audit has five connected parts:

Requirements define what counts as a pass. These can include WCAG, procurement standards, organizational policies, and product-specific acceptance criteria.
Scope identifies the pages, states, user journeys, technologies, and conformance target under evaluation.
Test methods combine automated rules, inspection, keyboard operation, viewport and zoom checks, and assistive-technology use.
Evidence records the tested environment, steps, actual behavior, expected behavior, affected code or interface, and requirement mapping.
Reporting and retesting turn findings into repair work, then confirm whether fixes resolve the barrier without introducing regressions.

These parts form a control loop. The scope selects representative content and complete processes. Test methods expose barriers within that scope. Evidence makes each result reproducible. Remediation changes the product. Retesting checks the changed behavior against the same requirement.

Accessibility Testing and Auditing

The evaluation system

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