An audit is absolutely essential to following best practices for ADA compliance and making a website WCAG 2.1 AA conformant. However, during the audit phase, we only find the issues – the website (or other digital asset) still has not been fixed.
What clients really like is our simple approach to remediation.
Understandably, many clients prefer their own digital teams to make direct fixes. But, because they don’t have a technical accessibility expert on staff, they usually need help with remediation. And, even if they don’t need help, we still need to validate the fixes to make sure they’re correct.
Technical Support Hours
When clients order an accessibility audit from us, they typically add a few hours of technical support. With just a few hours of technical support, we can go a long way in answering technical questions and validating fixes made.
Aside from answering client questions on implementation and technical accessibility, let’s now cover the simple validation process.
Fix and Validate
Depending on the number of accessibility issues in the report, we recommend a 10-20% incremental approach to client remediation. This fractional progress ensures the client puts real work in remediating, but, if they’re doing something wrong, they don’t continue remediation on the wrong track.
Example:
Let’s say an audit report returns 100 accessibility issues. A good start is for a client to work through 15-20 of those issues (and not all the same ones) so we can validate that the fixes are indeed being made correctly.
We’ll validate that batch, inform the team if they’re misaligned on anything, and then they can continue on with the next batch from the audit report. Depending on how well they did with the first 15-20 issues, they can work through even more on this next session, maybe 20-25.
Whittle Away
This your turn, our turn approach has works out really well. It’s efficient and effective.
How many technical support hours are involved really depends on:
- number of digital assets
- number of issues
- how complex the fixes are
- how experienced the developer team is
Obviously some accessibility issues are much easier to fix than others so the answer will always hinge on the circumstance. But let’s say we have an average Shopify website with 15 pages in scope. 4 technical support hours should cover it.
Prioritization of Issues
What issues should you work through first?
As we said, when starting, it’s good to have a nice collection of different issues so that your development team will have their work checked early on before they continue with, for example, 10 more fixes for the same type of issue.
What you can do here is use our Accessibility Tracker software to prioritize the issues by one of our two formulas: risk or impact.
Once you have the issues sorted by your preferred prioritization method, then you can select 1-2 issues from each tier of issues from your audit report and start with those issues. And Tracker will make it easy to keep track of exactly what issues you’ve fixed and what issues you’ve validated.
Here’s a simple illustration of what we mean from a hypothetical audit:
First Tier Issues:
- Keyboard trap in navigation menu (2.1.2)
- Dropdown menu missing ARIA roles and states (4.1.2)
- Issue 3
- Issue 4
- Issue 5
Second Tier Issues:
- Incorrect heading hierarchy (1.3.1)
- Missing focus indicators on interactive elements (2.4.7)
- Issue 3
- Issue 4
- Issue 5
Third Tier Issues:
- Insufficient color contrast (1.4.3)
- Audible notification not available otherwise (1.3.3)
- Issue 3
- Issue 4
- Issue 5
Here, we’d recommend taking a nice slice of different accessibility issues and working through them. So in this illustration, we’re not going to work through 5 different issues where a keyboard trap is identified, we’re just going to work through one. Same for a focus indicator fix, etc.
Accessibility Tracker is scheduled to be released March 15, 2025 and if you need help with an accessibility audit, you’re always welcome to reach out to us for a quick quote.
