Wakefly BlogWakefly's Process to Help Your Site Become More ADA Compliant

Wakefly’s ADA Compliance audit methodology is to review your website’s Critical Paths and Pages rather than to review every single page. If your website has many pages using the same template, such as press releases, blog posts and products, the quickest and most cost-effective way to determine ADA compliance is to review the relevant templates and several of the pages using that template because all pages using that particular template will have the same ADA issues.

The following are a few examples of Critical Paths and Pages:

1. High traffic pages (i.e. - Homepage, Contact Us, Product pages, etc)
2. Pages with actionable items (i.e. Conversion Pages, checkout or shopping cart pages)
3. Pages with forms, gallery images, and custom controls (i.e. - modal, tabbed content, accordions, etc.)
4. Stand-alone Pages (i.e. client feedback, landing pages)

Wakefly follows a four-step process when analyzing pages for ADA accessibility compliance. When performing an ADA website audit we will use the following steps:

Step One: WC3 “Easy Check”

Our first step is to complete the World Wide Web (WC3) recommended: “Easy Check” to get an idea of whether accessibility is addressed in even the most basic way. These checks cover just a few accessibility issues and are designed to be quick and easy, rather than definitive.

Step Two: Siteimprove Automated Scan

The next step is to complete a Baseline Technical Audit of your website.  Wakefly uses the Siteimprove Content & Accessibility software tool, to conduct an initial scan to highlight any issues that negatively impact accessibility and usability.

Step Three: Manual Page by Page Testing with additional specialized accessibility tools

For each critical path page, Wakefly manually performs a number of activities to ensure that your site is accessible, including:

• Navigate the site using only keyboard
• Review links to ensure there’s clearly provided link text
• Review images to ensure each one contains Image alt text
• Check videos to ensure each one contains captions and transcripts

Step Four: Screen Reader Testing

For each critical path page, Wakefly tests how well a screen reader can follow along on the page. Because no single tool will catch all accessibility issues, Wakefly will also run each critical path page through additional specialized accessibility tools to ensure most, if not all, issues are captured.

Step Five: Recommendation Summary & Report

Wakefly will present you with a custom accessibility report from its testing of the Critical Paths and Pages. This report will detail all findings ranked by priority, along with recommended resolution and estimate to fix.

So – what’s the takeaway from this blog article? The first is that there are software tools available that will scan your site and identify critical issues with your website meeting ADA Compliance. The second takeaway is that you also need to test your site with a human touch to get a high-level sense of how a person with a disability interacts with your site. The combination of software and human testing should give you comfort that you’ve done your best to satisfy the spirit of the law by meeting accessibility requirements.