Web Accessibility Audits

We carry out Web Accessibility Audits to ensure your web content conforms with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0) presents no barriers to disabled users .

Over the past few years our team has conducted Web Accessibility Audits on the following web sites (to name a few):

• Department of Transport
• GlaxoSmithKline
• MBNA
• Liverpool City Council
• Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council
• South Lakelands District Council
• Derbyshire County Council
• Manchester City Council
• Insight Media

Read more about Web Accessibility.

AbilityNet Partners

We also partner AbilityNet to provide technical audits. AbilityNet has key strengths, especially in disabled user testing, which sdesign1 will be seeking to leverage. It is also hoped that we will be able to further augment AbilityNet's existing expertise with our particular strengths in (X)HTML, CSS and web development.

Shaw Trust Web Accreditation

sdesign1 works with the Shaw Trust to provide both a technical audit as well as actual testing by disabled users. If your site passes testing you will be able to display the Shaw Trust Web Accreditation symbol. If there are any issues preventing accreditation we will make you aware of them and after 6 months, as part of the package, we'll test again to check whether these issues have been dealt with. This should give you enough time to resolve any existing problems and achieve accreditation. Cost of Accreditation is £4,200.

Web Compliance Levels

Accreditation is to two levels - Accessible (AA standard) and Accessible + (most of the AAA standard). After feedback from the testers, some of the AAA checkpoints were felt to be no longer useful and have been omitted. The Web Accessibility Audits we conduct compromise of two elements, the Technical Web Accessibility Audit carried out by our Web team and Web Usability testing carried out by our disabled user testing team.

Technical Web Accessibility Audits

These aim to assess specifically how conformant a web site is with WCAG 1.0. In other words, we aim to verify how well Web content meets the requirements of a W3C standard. Within this technical audit there are two further elements, manual testing and automated testing.

Manual Web Accessibility Testing

Some content simply can't be tested using automated accessibility validators. As an example, an image of an apple could have alt text set to 'orange' which is clearly inappropriate. There is no automated tool yet available that could recognise the contents of an image and determine whether the alt text was correct. There are numerous other issues too, that require a tester to sit and look at (or listen to) a page and check its conformance. This element of the audit is known as manual testing.

Automated Web Accessibility Testing

This involves using software to spider or index the contents of a site and look for code validation errors or any error which appears to contravene WCAG 1.0. Its advantage is that thousands of pages can be tested within minutes. Its disadvantage is that it is limited in scope as conformance with only some of the guidelines can be verified, such as code validity, presence of alt text (appropriate or not).

A technical web accessibility audit would normally be a combination of manual and automated testing.

Disabled User Testing

This will be carried out by the Shaw Trust by a team of experienced users of adaptive technology with :

• No vision
• Low vision
• Colour blindness
• Dyslexia
• Deaf
• Mobility impairments
• Learning difficulties

Should you wish to, you can actually visit the Shaw Trust Testing Center in South Wales and gain first hand experience of the barriers that disabled people may face whilst navigating your site.

Custom Web Accessibility Audits

In addition to offering web accessibility audits specifically to gain Shaw Trust Web accreditation we can put together a testing package built around your requirements. It could be you only need one type of testing such as the technical audit. You might also need advice on how to deal with specific web accessibility issues existing on your site without having a complete audit.

We're happy to build a package that meets your needs so please feel free to contact us by filling in the form below. Alternatively, call us on 0151 223 0001 for a free no obligation chat.