Tab through it, turn on a screen reader for five minutes, check contrast, view the heading outline, read the link list, and test on a phone with one thumb.

Why do it yourself first

An audit produces a document. Ten minutes produces changes.

Most small business sites have a handful of genuine problems, and it is broadly the same handful turning up across almost every site.

Those are findable without expertise, and fixing them removes most of the actual barriers people encounter.

A professional audit is worth having for anything transactional, or where a compliance obligation exists, and it is a better use of money once the obvious things are already done rather than before.

Check one: tab through it

Two minutes, and it finds the keyboard problems.

Load the homepage, put the mouse down, and press tab repeatedly.

Watch whether you can always see where focus is, whether the order makes sense, and whether you can reach everything.

Then open any popup and try to close it without the mouse.

What you are looking for: an invisible focus indicator, an unreachable element, and anything that traps focus.

Check two: turn on a screen reader

Five minutes, and it is the check that changes how people think about the whole subject.

Every current computer and phone has one built in, activated through accessibility settings.

Turn it on, close your eyes or look away, and try to find your own phone number.

It will be disorienting and that is the point, because it is what a proportion of visitors experience on every site they use.

Note the three worst things you hear, turn it off again, and fix those. Do not attempt to become proficient with the software itself.

Check three: measure contrast

One minute, and it produces a fact rather than an opinion.

Browser developer tools report the contrast ratio for any text on the page, and free online checkers do the same from two colour values.

Check the body text, any grey text, links within paragraphs, and any text sitting over an image.

Below four and a half to one for ordinary text is a fail, and it is usually a ten-minute fix in the theme.

Check four: view the heading outline

One minute per page, using a free browser extension or developer tools.

Read the list of headings on its own. It should read like a sensible table of contents for that page.

What you are looking for: no main heading, several main headings, skipped levels, and headings applied to things that are not headings.

If the outline does not describe the page, the structure is wrong however good the page looks.

Check five: read the link list

One minute, and it finds the read more problem.

Extensions will list every link on a page in a few seconds, or you can scan the page and note them.

Read the list without the page around it. Each entry should indicate where it goes.

Anything reading read more, click here, or a bare web address is a problem, and identical text pointing to different pages is a subtler one.

Check six: one thumb on a phone

Two minutes, on a real device rather than a resized window.

Hold the phone one-handed and try to complete your contact form using only a thumb.

Tap the phone number, close any popup, open the menu, and submit the form.

Anything you miss repeatedly is a target that is too small, and anything you cannot do at all is a genuine barrier.

Doing this outdoors adds a contrast test for free, since sunlight reduces effective contrast substantially.

A worked example

A business that ran these six checks in an afternoon, having previously been quoted several thousand for an audit.

They found five things: no visible focus outline, grey body text failing contrast, a popup that could not be closed by keyboard, a services page where six links all read more, and a phone number that was text rather than a link.

All five were fixed within two days, mostly by their existing site maintainer.

They then commissioned an audit the following year, which found further issues and none as significant as the five they had already resolved.

The auditor's comment afterwards was that arriving once the obvious work had already been done made the whole engagement considerably more useful.

Automated checkers

Worth using and worth understanding the limits of.

Free tools scan a page and report issues, which is a fast way to find missing alt text, contrast failures and structural problems.

What they cannot assess is whether alt text is meaningful, whether link text describes its destination, or whether a page makes sense when navigated non-visually.

Which means a clean automated report is not a passing grade at all. It means only that the machine-checkable subset is fine.

Roughly speaking they catch a minority of real issues, and the manual checks above catch most of the rest.

Recording what you found

Worth doing properly, because the list has a second life.

Write each issue as what somebody cannot do rather than as a technical description.

Cannot close the newsletter popup using a keyboard is more useful than focus trap in modal, because it tells whoever fixes it what to test afterwards.

Note the page, the browser and the device, since some issues appear only in one combination.

That list is then the brief for whoever does the work, and it is considerably more actionable than a generated report of a hundred items sorted by severity.

Keep it after the work is done, since it becomes the retest list the next time anything changes.

Who should run these

Whoever will act on the result, which is usually the owner rather than a supplier.

The checks need no technical knowledge and the findings are easier to act on when the person who found them cares about the outcome.

A supplier asked to audit their own work is in an awkward position, and one asked to fix a list produced by the client is in a straightforward one.

What to do with what you find

  1. Write down everything, without fixing as you go.
  2. Order it by who is excluded, not by difficulty.
  3. Fix anything blocking a task first.
  4. Then anything on the contact and service pages.
  5. Then everything else.
  6. Repeat the six checks after any redesign.

The sixth matters because these problems reappear over time. A theme update or a new plugin can remove a focus outline or change a contrast ratio, and nothing announces that it happened.

Why any of this matters is covered in text somebody can read without zooming.

Frequently asked questions

Why test it myself first?

An audit produces a document; ten minutes produces changes. Most small sites have the same handful of problems and they are findable without expertise.

What are the six checks?

Tab through it, use a screen reader for five minutes, measure contrast, view the heading outline, read the link list, and use a phone one-handed.

Do I need to learn a screen reader?

No. Turn it on, try to find your own phone number, note the three worst things, and turn it off. Proficiency is not the point.

How do I measure contrast?

Browser developer tools report the ratio for any text, and free checkers do the same from two colours. Below four and a half to one is a fail.

Are automated checkers enough?

No. They catch a minority of real issues and cannot assess whether alt text is meaningful or whether a page makes sense navigated non-visually.

When is a professional audit worth it?

For anything transactional or with a compliance obligation, and after the obvious work is done rather than before, which makes the engagement more useful.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Quoted several thousand for an accessibility audit?

Run six checks yourself first. Most sites have five obvious problems, and fixing them first makes any audit more useful.

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