The Lightning Audit is a super fast look at a site’s accessibility. It’s how I can determine in about 1 minute whether a site has a little work or a lot of work.
Now, I’ve been working in accessibility for 5 years, so there’s a good chance it will take you longer than 1 minute to run these tests.
When is the Lightning Audit useful?
If you have a new lead and you want to get a ballpark of the site needs. You don’t need a deliverable to give a client, you just need a couple of talking points for a first client meeting.
If you are looking at existing clients and want to determine which ones need accessibility work.
When you want to practice your accessibility skills and take a look at some different pages.
There are 7 tests and each test gets 1 point if passed
- Does an accessibility statement exist?
- Does skip to content link pass?
- Is the site free from autoplay/continuous animations?
- Is there a good focus state?
- Does the main menu work with the keyboard?
- Does color contrast look good?
- Are links & buttons obvious?
If you are not familiar with these tests or how to run them, accessibility consultations are available.
Once I run that, I just look at the points the site earned.
- 6 to 7 points: The page is pretty good, there will likely be a small remediation effort. The remediation cost should be around 0 to 20% of the build cost.
- 4 to 5 points: The page needs medium remediation work. The remediation cost should be around 20% to 40% of the build cost.
- 2 to 3 points: The page needs a large remediation work. Consider whether remediating or rebuilding is a better plan. To remediate, the cost should be around 40% to 60% of the build cost.
- 0 to 1 points: The page needs significant remediation work and a rebuild should be strongly considered. The remediation cost should be more than 60% of the build cost.
To get a picture of a whole site, I run this on a sample of the site’s pages.
How does this differ from the quick audit process?
The purpose of the quick audit is to determine a lot more information about the site and what is causing the various problems. The quick audit generally finds about 90% or more of issues that are affecting real users.
The Lightning Audit doesn’t determine why issues exist. It doesn’t look at the causes or what it will take to fix them. It’s not useful to present to a client. In fact, it won’t find half the issues. However, it does find the issues that have a high correlation with the overall accessibility.
Transcript
Hi, and welcome back to the Easy A11y Guide channel. I’m Gen Herres, and in this video, we’re going to talk about the Lightning Audit, which is a really quick one-minute accessibility audit.
The Lightning Audit is a preliminary audit. It is really great for the beginning of the process, either when you want to qualify a new client or when you have an existing client and you want to qualify them for whether they would or would not be a a good choice for selling accessibility, too. And of course, it’s great when you’re just short on time.
Why can’t we just use automation instead? Well, automation tools are pretty well known now, and they can be tricked quite easily. Automated scores do not correlate well with barriers for real people. There are plenty of sites that get great automated scores and have a really poor performance for real people.
The Lightning Audit is composed of seven tests. The first three tests take about 15 to 20 seconds, if you’re familiar with accessibility testing. Does an accessibility statement exist? Does skip to content link pass its requirements? Is the site free of autoplay or continuous animations?
Then we get into the next four. These take about 40 to 45 seconds. Is there a good focus date? Does the main Can you work with the keyboard? Does color contrast look good? Are links and buttons obvious?
That’s it. That’s the whole audit. Now we take a look at the results. We score the websites based on how many tests they passed.
If they pass all seven tests, we give them a score of seven. If they passed fewer, then we give them a lower score. If they’ve gotten a score of 6-7, the page is pretty good. It will likely be a small remediation effort. If they’ve scored 4-5 points, then the page needs a medium amount of remediation work.
If they’ve scored 2-3 points, the page needs a large amount of remediation work, and we should seriously consider whether rebuilding certain sections of the site may be a better choice than trying to remediate them.
Finally, the last group of sites, those are the ones that score zero to one point. This means that they need significant remediation work, and it may be a much better idea to simply rebuild the entire thing.
The Lightning Audit can also give us some insight on general ballpark of pricing. If you’ve gotten six or seven points, it’s probably going to cost between zero and 20% of the build cost.
If you’ve gotten four to five points, it’s going to cost between 20 and 40% of the build cost. If you have 2-3 points, 40 to 60 % of the build cost, and the last group would be more than 60 % of the build cost.
We’ll take a quick example of Wix. The Wix homepage has zero errors on Wave, and it scores a perfect score of 100 on Google Lighthouse. However, when we run the Lightning audit, we see it gets only four out of seven.
Let’s take a quick look. First up, we have an accessibility statement. We can see it here in the footer, Accessibility Statement exists. Next up, we are going to test the skip to Content Link. And skip to Content Link shows up, and it looks like it passes contrast, so that gets a pass. The next is free of autoplay and continuous animations. Well, we definitely got a bit of movement going on here. And here Here we have animations or autoplay that is running and keeps going, so it does not pass.
Current score is two out of three. Next, we are going to test the main menu. Looks like we can get into the main menu. That looks like it’s all right. We are going to test the focus state. And here we have a button and looks like poor contrast on the focus state, so that won’t pass.
Next, we’re going to look at just the overall color contrast in the default state on the site. It’s a lot of movement, but we’re just checking for color contrast right now. And overall, the color contrast looks pretty good.
Next one is, are the links and buttons within this site obvious? Well, I wasn’t really sure whether that was a link or not. These apparently are links, and they have no hover state. So we are going to say that the links are not good.
What they scored. They had an accessibility statement, they had a skip to content link. They had a keyboard operable main menu, and the color contrast overall looked good for readability. That gives them a score four out of seven, which is a lot different than what we got from automated testing, which had zero errors and a perfect score on Google Lighthouse.
Here we can see real people versus automation, and there’s a definite difference in those scores. Next time you need to give a really quick evaluation on a website, go ahead and use the Lightning Audit.