WCAG Audit Services in Canada
At Accessibility Partners, we provide comprehensive WCAG Audit services to help businesses ensure their digital products meet accessibility standards. Our expert team conducts thorough accessibility evaluations, identifying potential barriers and offering detailed insights to help you achieve compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
By partnering with Accessibility Partners for your WCAG Audit, you gain access to customized solutions designed to improve web accessibility. Our audits go beyond surface-level checks, ensuring that your website, mobile applications, and digital content are fully accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, and compliant with legal requirements.
What is WCAG Audit and Why Do You Need One?
A WCAG audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your digital assets against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a set of standards designed to make content more accessible to people with disabilities. These guidelines, especially the latest requirements as per WCAG 2.2, cover areas like text alternatives for images, color contrast, keyboard navigation, and much more, ensuring that websites, mobile apps, and documents are usable by everyone, regardless of ability.
Conducting a WCAG accessibility audit is essential for organizations that want to ensure web accessibility compliance. With increasing legal requirements and the ethical need to provide inclusive experiences, a WCAG audit helps businesses identify accessibility barriers and fix them before they become a liability!
Our WCAG Audit Process
Step 1: Initial Consultation
Our process begins with a detailed consultation to understand your organization’s objectives and challenges. We assess your current digital environment, target audience, and accessibility goals such as achieving WCAG 2.2 compliance and improving usability. This tailored approach ensures that our audit aligns with your unique needs.
Step 2: Comprehensive Accessibility Audit
We conduct an in-depth accessibility audit of your digital content using a combination of manual testing and automated tools to ensure precise and comprehensive results. This evaluation focuses on the four WCAG accessibility principles:
- Perceivable: Ensuring content is accessible through alternatives, such as alt text for images, captions for multimedia, and clearly labeled visual elements. Screen reader testing is used to verify effectiveness.
- Operable: Examining navigation, forms, and interactive elements to confirm they function smoothly with keyboards and assistive devices. Specific tests identify barriers to usability.
- Understandable: Evaluating the clarity and organization of content and navigation, ensuring ease of use for all users. Automated tools help detect overlooked issues.
- Robust: Testing for cross-platform compatibility with various browsers, devices, and assistive technologies. This step includes color contrast analysis and device adaptability checks.
Step 3: Key Findings and Recommendations
The WCAG Audit results are then consolidated into a detailed Accessibility Audit Report. We develop this to serve as a strategic guide for achieving and maintaining compliance. This report provides a clear framework for addressing accessibility gaps, prioritizing fixes, and aligning your digital assets with WCAG standards. Here are some of the inclusions:
- Compliance Score: A measurable percentage of your adherence to WCAG 2.2 standards.
- Detailed Findings: A thorough list of issues, such as missing alternative text, improper heading hierarchies, or inadequate color contrast.
- Practical Recommendations: Clear steps for resolving issues, with explanations suitable for both technical and non-technical team members. We also highlight how these changes will improve usability for users with disabilities.
Step 4: Remediation Support
While identifying barriers to accessibility is in itself an essential step, achieving accessibility still requires expertise. We work closely with your team to ensure all the areas of concern as per our audit are addressed. We offer hands-on support to ensure that remediation is effective and aligned with WCAG 2.2 standards. This includes…
- Design Enhancements: Adjusting visual elements, layouts, and color schemes to meet accessibility criteria.
- Content Refinement: Updating text, multimedia, and other digital assets to align with WCAG guidelines.
- Technical Corrections: Revising HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to address technical barriers and improve functionality.
Step 5: Final Review and Testing
After remediation, we conduct a comprehensive re-audit to validate that all issues have been resolved and WCAG compliance has been achieved. This step guarantees that your digital assets meet global accessibility standards and are optimized for diverse user needs. It includes:
- Re-testing previously identified issues to confirm they are resolved.
- Performing manual and automated checks to verify compliance.
- Conducting usability tests to ensure the site is intuitive and user-friendly for individuals with disabilities.
Step 6: Executive Summary
Concise and impactful summaries allow for quick decision-making and ideation! To aid in this process, we provide a brief executive summary to help keep all relevant stakeholders in the loop. Here’s what you can expect the typical executive summary to cover:
- Compliance Overview: A concise evaluation of your progress toward WCAG 2.2 compliance.
- Major Challenges and Resolutions: A summary of critical issues and their solutions.
- Future Strategy: Recommendations for sustaining accessibility compliance over time.
AODA/ACA Compliance Help
Is Your Organization Undergoing an Audit? Need Expert Help with Your Compliance Report?
Why Choose Accessibility Partners for WCAG Audit Services??
Detailed Reports
Accessibility Partners go far beyond simple checklists in WCAG audits. Our detailed, in-depth reports provide a thorough analysis of accessibility barriers within your digital assets, explaining the root causes of non-compliance and offering clear, step-by-step instructions on how to resolve them.
Customized Solutions
We understand that every organization has distinct goals, challenges, and resources. That’s why our WCAG audit services are fully customizable. Whether you’re focusing on web accessibility, mobile applications, or digital documents, we craft solutions that are tailored to your business’s specific needs.
Industry-Recognized Tools
To ensure the highest level of accuracy and thoroughness in WCAG audits, Accessibility Partners uses industry-recognized testing tools that are considered the gold standard in accessibility assessment. These tools allow us to assess your digital assets from multiple angles, ensuring that we identify all potential compliance issues.
Expert Guidance
Our WCAG audit services are backed by years of experience and a team of experts who are passionate about digital accessibility. We don’t just conduct audits; we provide expert guidance on how to interpret the results and implement the necessary changes.
Proven Track Record
With a proven track record of successful WCAG audits, we have helped businesses across a wide range of industries – from small startups to large enterprises – achieve and maintain accessibility compliance.
Today, compliance with accessibility standards must take a more conscious and purposeful approach! This is where working with Accessibility Partners can make your organization inclusive, accessible, and preferred by all!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Our WCAG audit report provides a comprehensive, detailed analysis of your website or digital asset against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Yes, after completing the WCAG audit, we provide a detailed, easy-to-understand report.
A WCAG audit is an essential step toward achieving compliance, but it’s important to understand that the audit itself does not guarantee full compliance.
Absolutely! After the WCAG audit, we can assist with fixing the accessibility issues identified in the report.
If your website is not WCAG-compliant, it’s important to take immediate action to identify and resolve the accessibility issues.
The duration of a WCAG audit depends on the complexity of the website or digital asset being tested, including the number of pages, content types, and features.
We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG, WCAG 2.2), which are globally recognized standards for web accessibility.
While a WCAG audit is an important step in reducing the risk of legal action, it does not guarantee protection from lawsuits.