An elephant in the market that rarely gets the attention it deserves it the quality of the accessibility audit itself.
Audits are talked about as if they were commodities (an apple is an apple is an apple), but how could they be? They’re not. There are auditors out there that are auditing on different levels.
If each were to take a test — with the test being how accurate and complete their audit report was, some would score 95-100, others 90-95, still others 80-90 and so on.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is not an interchangeable service (services rarely are, are they?).
Good Auditor Qualities
When I look for auditors to contract with, the qualities I look for are:
- experience
- genuine care
- obsessive
- meticulous
- technical expertise
I want someone who will fight me over whether or not an accessibility issue should be included; I want someone who will argue with me on the interpretation of a WCAG success criterion.
Additionally, the genuine care means a lot. If someone actually cares about accessibility, it means they won’t let themselves not try to find all of the issues.
Of course, experience and technical expertise are prerequisites and you can’t be an auditor unless you pay attention to detail. It’s what the job is: attention to detail.
Missing Issues
To err is human, but to err too much is not an auditor. Then you’re out of a job.
Audits are definitionally conducted by humans; they’re fully manual evaluations (with automated scans used only to ensure all issues correctly flagged by a scan are included in the report). So there is an understanding that an issue can be missed on rare occasion, but those occasions have to be rare and they better not be obvious.
What’s that saying — something like, what do you call a football player who doesn’t play? Not a football player.
Something like that. The point being if a football player is injured too much and always on the sidelines then they’re not actually a football player.
The same applies to accessibility auditors. If you miss too many issues, you’re just not an auditor.
What many contractors don’t realize when they initially work with me is I’m testing them. Their deliverables aren’t shipped on a plane straight from them to the client with me as the brief layover.
No, I have another expert grade them to see if their audit quality stacks up.
And most time it does not.
Marketplace
And this is the marketplace. Audits of varying quality been exchanged from freelancers, agencies, and companies to clients relying upon the fine accuracy of the reports.
And, by the way, some of the biggest companies have some of the worst quality of audits.
Why is that so?
Because most corporations lose sight of the quality and sharpen their focus on profit; their auditing teams become more of like industrial mills that churns out Excel spreadsheets.
If we had a global audit-off and everyone’s audits got randomly and unexpectedly graded on that A-B-C scale I was talking about earlier, Big Accessibility Co. would have to really start digging deep in their corporate press release bag.
Importance
Audit quality isn’t important, it’s essential. It’s a non-negotiable.
It’s foundational to everything we’re trying to do.
How can our digital assets be accessible, WCAG conformant, and compliant unless we’re able to fix the issues that exist. If the audit report that we’re working from is littered with missing issues, then everything is wrong.
It’s somewhat analogous to if we just fixed all the issues flagged by an automated scan or AI analysis of our code: we’d be working from incomplete information which would mean our foundation was unstable.
Summary
Accessibility audits are not commodities. Make sure you select a reputable service provider who might fight with you if you say their report is wrong.
If you’d like us to audit your digital asset, we’d love to help. Contact us and we’ll get back to you ASAP.
P.S. We can also audit the audit reports from your provider. #insurance
