Checking a website for an accessibility statement is important to facilitate communication and avoid legal issues. If the website has an accessibility statement, you’ll want to review the statement for a commitment to digital accessibility, evidence of progress, and contact information (usually an email address).
We can help you build your accessibility statement.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Accessibility Quick Audit Series. I’m Gen Herres from Easy A11y Guide, and in this video, I’ll cover how to check a website for an accessibility statement. There are two reasons why you want to do this. The first is that having an accessibility statement allows someone the ability to easily contact you rather than going straight to legal action. This is much preferable.
The second is that with most lawsuits for accessibility, one of the requirements of the settlement is that an accessibility statement is added to the website. So, let’s go ahead and make sure it’s added before you have any legal issues. Now we’re going to get into how to check for one. I would normally categorize this as a simple manual check that a person with limited training can do.
Check the accessibility statement exists
First, you want to check the web page for the word accessibility. Some sites just use a single word. Some use accessibility policy or accessibility statement. A few sites for larger corporations may just have a single policies link, and if you follow that link, they will have a whole bunch of policies. This is considered acceptable. If you aren’t able to find it at all, then we’ll mark that as a content failure.
If you do find the policy, you’ll want to ensure that the policy can be reached via keyboard navigation. If it cannot, then it might be a failure of the theme, the website add-on, or a content failure, depending on what caused the keyboard navigation to fail. For this, you will need a more experienced tester to determine the root cause. Please take a look at my video on who can do what parts of an accessibility quick audit.
If the site does have a policy, you’ll want to visit the policy and briefly review it. You’re going to be looking for three parts. The first is a commitment to digital accessibility. The second is a demonstration that the website is doing something to achieve it. And the third is contact information. Generally, we’re looking for an email address.
Review the policy for basic information
Let’s go ahead and take a look at a few example policies. Here I am on Usable Net’s website. I have scrolled down to the footer, which is where I expect to find an accessibility policy. I have used my cursor to just select something in the footer that moves my keyboard focus down into the footer. Now on my keyboard, I will hit tab.
You’ll see a double outline, a white inner outline, and a blue outer outline. This is great because the white and the blue have contrast with each other. So even if they don’t have contrast with the background, you can still see them. And here we have the word Accessibility Statement. If we press return on the keyboard, it will follow that link.
Commitment to accessibility
Here we are on Usable Net’s Accessibility Statement. The first thing we are looking for is the commitment to web accessibility. Here they state Usable Net is committed to facilitating the accessibility and usability of its website.
We’ll next take a quick glance over at the Deque website. You’ll see here Deque is committed to our mission of digital equality and is dedicated to providing an excellent user experience for everyone.
And finally, we’re going to quickly take a look at whitehouse.gov. This commitment to accessibility for all begins with this site and our efforts to ensure all functionality and all content is accessible to all Americans. So all three of these websites have a clear commitment to a digital accessibility.
Check for some kind of action on their accessibility commitment
Next, we are going to check for them doing something about it. So here we have a note that says, “Our ongoing accessibility effort works towards conforming to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 Level AA criteria.” So it starts to list out that they are doing something.
Next, we’ll go back to Usable Net. Here they have a note that says, below are some of the steps we are taking under our accessibility policy. They list that they are employing experienced accessibility developers and experts to conduct website audits and provide Usable Net website developers with recommendations to improve the website. Great.
Finally, we are going to hop over to Deque, and we can see they have an ongoing effort to ensure accessible content. They state that they are using the WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 as guiding principle, and they are working to test their websites going forward by saying, “Testing of our digital content is performed by our accessibility experts using Deque-developed automated testing software, screen readers, color contrast analyzer, and keyboard-only navigation techniques.” So they are showing they are doing both some automated testing and some human testing.
Includes contact information
Finally, we are going to check to make sure that these websites include contact information. Here on Deque, they have a phone number to call and an email address. Over on Usable Net, they have contact information to contact them with your questions by providing an email address.
And third, on the whitehouse.gov website, they have a phone number, and they also have a phone number for the hearing impaired. If you did find any of these three criteria to be lacking in the accessibility policy, then you’ll want to note it as a content failure and recommend that they add whichever item was missing to their accessibility statement or policy.
Thanks for watching. I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide, where we try to make accessibility easier to implement through done-for-you services, tools, and processes. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. It really helps our channel.
You can subscribe to our channel for more accessibility tips and to be notified when new videos are released. For more information on web accessibility, including services, tutorials, and more, please visit easya11yguide.com. Thank you so much again for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
We can help you build your accessibility statement.