The Audit → Fix → Track Process for WCAG Conformance

Digital accessibility and compliance can be distilled to three steps:

1. Audit
2. Fix
3. Track

This means we:

1. Find issues
2. Fix issues
3. Track the fixes

This is how we make our website or other digital asset(s) WCAG 2.1 AA or WCAG 2.2 AA conformant.

Let’s talk about each step.

Audit

An accessibility audit is a formal evaluation of a digital asset based on a technical standard such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

We use screen reader testing, keyboard testing, and other manual evaluation methodologies to identify all accessibility issues and then compile those issues into a report.

Fix

Next, we fix the issues. This phase of the process is known as remediation.

Here our team uses the audit report as a guide on what to fix and how to fix.

Track

Both during and after remediation, we track the issues.

We need to know what’s been fixed and what’s not been fixed. And when we have a validator review our fixes, we need to know what issues still haven’t been resolved.

Resources

If you have an in-house technical accessibility expert, they can conduct the audit.

Otherwise, you’ll want to source out an audit to a reputable firm like WebAIM or Accessible.org (my company).

For everything post audit, we built Accessibility Tracker to reduce the time and money necessary to complete an accessibility project.

3 quick features:

• Audit-based (just upload your audit report)
• AI to help your team make fixes
• Status labels to track the status of each issue

You can learn more at AccessibilityTracker.com.

Advice

Three more lines of advice:

• Select a manageable scope (e.g., 15 pages of a website vs. 35)
• Assign multiple team members to the project and have them work on the issues that match their role (e.g., content managers work on alt text)
• Put full force into the project until it’s completed

Summary

If you take a step back from your project, the work nicely silos into three buckets:

1. Audit
2. Fix
3. Track