Evaluating Digital Content for Accessibility

Evaluating accessibility requires a combination of methods to ensure your digital content meets the needs of all users. Automated tools can quickly identify common issues, manual checks address those requiring human judgment, and user testing provides real-world feedback from people with disabilities. Together, these methods form a robust approach to accessibility evaluation and improvement.

Automated Checks

Automated accessibility evaluation tools are useful for quickly identifying common issues in digital content, but they have limitations and cannot fully replace human evaluation. Explore what an automated accessibility checker what can and cannot do.

WAVE is an example of an automated accessibility evaluation tool. Explore the WAVE quick reference guide that includes plain language descriptions of the different accessibility errors and alerts included as flags by the WAVE evaluation tool.

In the quick reference guide, each error and alert is linked to a corresponding help document that includes: potential impact on users, common misconceptions and clarifications, examples, strategies for how to avoid/fix the issue, how to check a webpage for the issue, a look at related coding, and related WCAG standards.

Manual Review

Manual accessibility checks are an essential complement to automated tools. They rely on human judgment to assess aspects of accessibility that tools can't fully evaluate. Explore key manual checks and guidance for evaluating headings, color contrast, link text, keyboard navigation, forms, and tables.

Engaging Users with Disabilities

Involving people with disabilities in accessibility testing is an essential step in creating digital content that truly meets the needs of all users. While automated tools and manual reviews identify many issues, user testing provides critical insights into how real users interact with your content or platform.