There are common implementation risks to consider that can affect your accessibility journey at every step, especially because they can easily affect accessible content you’ve built or introduce issues you weren’t aware of.
We have selected the main ones you need to pay attention to and identify whether they’re already under control in your organisation. If not, learn with us how to prevent them from affecting your website’s accessibility efforts.
Effective accessibility testing starts with knowing what you are testing against. Understanding what regulation applies to your organisation is the first step to achieving compliance.
Each law may use different accessibility requirements to analyse a website, and you don’t want to make your pages accessible in accordance with the wrong standard.
It is important to know that WCAG provides internationally recognised web accessibility guidelines, but organisations may also need to consider legislation and accessibility standards that apply to their particular market.
For example, depending on where a business operates and what services it provides, requirements under the European Accessibility Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act or other national legislation may be relevant.
If you’re not sure what law applies to you, find out by checking our Free Accessibility Compliance Checkers by Region.
Testing against the wrong requirements can create a false sense of compliance. A website might perform well against one set of criteria while still failing to meet the requirements that actually apply to the organisation.
So, based on that, you already know where to start.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the websites are still not accessible, affecting people with disabilities and the overall user experience.
An accessibility score is an important piece to analyse how accessible your website is and, most importantly, to understand how serious and urgent the situation of your digital content is.
One example is the recent accessibility enforcement action involving Carrefour, a big French retailer, for not being accessible to people with visual disabilities.
The company had assumed they were in a good position, since their accessibility score showed that the website was 71% accessible. However, this wasn’t enough for WCAG conformance.
Accommodating some groups of people with disabilities while excluding others, or not having a clear accessibility statement demonstrating what they’ve been doing to improve digital accessibility, are examples that show why a high accessibility score isn’t good enough.
Automated accessibility testing can help you find many common issues quickly. It can scan pages, identify potential barriers and give your team a useful starting point for remediation.
But a percentage of automated checks passed does not mean that your website has achieved the same percentage of WCAG conformance.
This can only be achieved by meeting the applicable success criteria at the required conformance level.
This is why it's important to understand what your accessibility results actually tell you.
For example, Nexus Inclusion's Website Scanner can help you not only detect accessibility issues across your website. It also offers a comprehensive analysis of your website’s accessibility, with detailed guidance on how to fix them, along with learning material so the team can avoid reintroducing issues.
Another important feature is Nexus Inclusion's accessibility monitoring tool. It helps you keep track of accessibility changes over time, so your team can detect new issues quickly, instead of being exposed to legal risks and penalties, like what happened to Carrefour.
Accessibility can easily become one person's responsibility.
It’s common to find organisations that assign someone to run the accessibility test. Someone to fix the issues. Maybe a compliance team to check the results, especially in larger organisations.
It might look like the right path. However, it hides a problem that can easily affect WCAG compliance.
Accessibility is part of the digital experience, so it shouldn't sit completely separate from the teams creating that experience.
If accessibility is only considered once a website or product has already been built, your team may discover problems when they're more difficult to fix.
A component might need to be redesigned. Content might need to be rewritten. Developers might need to revisit work that has already been completed.
A better approach is bringing digital accessibility into the process earlier.
In practice, that means:
Including accessibility requirements during planning.
Considering accessibility when choosing design patterns and components.
Testing components before they're reused across your website.
Including accessibility checks in development and QA processes.
Giving content teams clear accessibility guidance.
Making accessibility part of your organisation's wider risk management.
If you want to truly build digital accessibility and inclusion in your organisation, you should give different teams the information and guidance they need to make more accessible decisions as part of their existing work.
In this article, we go through why it’s so important to think about digital accessibility in early stages of product development, explaining how to do that in practice: Website Accessibility: Moving From Reactive Fixes to Proactive Delivery.
Finding an accessibility issue is only useful if something happens next.
Imagine this:
A few weeks later, your website has 20 new pages, the backlog has grown and those original accessibility issues are still waiting to be resolved.
Accessibility testing can quickly become overwhelming when teams don't have a clear process for deciding what needs to happen next.
Instead of treating every finding as an item on a never-ending to-do list, try to understand the bigger picture:
This is where clear remediation guidance can make a difference.
The Nexus Inclusion platform, for example, gives the results showing what disability groups are being affected, how severe each issue is, what WCAG principle it fails, along with practical information to help your team understand how to fix it.
All this information can be easily filtered by the team, so the remediation plan can be structured around the organisation’s priorities.
There is a big difference between fixing accessibility issues and preventing the same issues from coming back.
Without looking at the root cause, teams can end up in a repetitive cycle.
Some repetition is normal. Websites change, content is added and technology is updated.
But if your team keeps finding the same types of accessibility issues, it might be time to look beyond the individual pages.
For example, imagine that inaccessible form controls keep appearing across your website during accessibility audits. In this case, you should ask yourself: “Why are we creating inaccessible forms in the first place?”
Maybe the component used by your developers needs to be updated.
The same applies to content.
If your content team regularly publishes images without appropriate alternative text, having to repeatedly correct those images can be frustrating and isn’t an effective long-term solution.
You might need better content guidance, processes or checks before content is published.
This is why analysing patterns in your accessibility results is so important. Ask yourself:
Although Nexus Inclusion’s platform includes with a robust monitoring solution to help companies spot recurring issues like these, we highly recommend also investing in accessibility training.
Our Learning & Certification section is part of all our plans so teams can have access to digital inclusion knowledge material, compliance guides, and digital accessibility courses.
With that, it’ll be easier to present repeated fixes, using the time and efforts of the team in a better way.
Sustainable digital accessibility means creating a process that continues as your website, content and teams change.
Start by understanding where your biggest accessibility risks are, then create a process that helps your team find, understand, fix and monitor them over time.
Nexus Inclusion can support that process by bringing accessibility testing, monitoring, content and image analysis, and practical remediation guidance together in one platform.
Ready to see where your website stands?
Start with a free accessibility scan and get a clearer picture of the issues affecting your website.
Today, people with disabilities represent more than 15% of the world's population, and with digital accessibility regulations being enforced around the globe, website accessibility is something that cannot wait any longer.
Website accessibility is unfortunately still approached primarily as a reactive process. Many organisations follow a pattern of fixing issues at a later stage, and sometimes even repeating the same problems over and over again.
The first significant accessibility enforcement since the EAA (European Accessibility Act) came into effect has been issued. French retail giant Carrefour has been condemned by the judicial court of Caen for not being accessible to people with visual disabilities.
Start with a free accessibility scan and get a clearer picture of the issues affecting your website.