2 Minute Website Accessibility Audit

Transcript

Today, I’m going to show you how to run a quick two minute accessibility audit on your website. While this audit won’t identify every possible accessibility defect on your site, it can help you find some of the most common issues.

To perform this audit, you will need Chrome version 150 or later and have the ARC Toolkit Chrome extension installed in your browser. Let’s get started.

First, starting from the top of the page, press your TAB key. The first thing you should see is a visible link that says something like Skip to Content. If you keep pressing your TAB key, you should see a visible outline appear around links, buttons, and form fields as you move through the page. Note if the skip link is missing and if there are any items that don’t have a focus indicator.

If you can see the focus indicator, move to your navigation menu and try to open a drop- down menu by pressing ENTER. Note if you can’t reach your navigation menu or open a drop-own menu using just your keyboard.

Next, right click on your page and click Inspect. Then select the ARC Toolkit tab. Click “Run Tests” and review the findings. This extension will find a wide variety of issues including color contrast errors, missing image alt text, missing labels for links and buttons, missing form labels, inability to zoom in and out, and other coding errors.

Starting with Chrome version 150, the Lighthouse extension will include an Agentic Browsing score, which is a fraction-based rating for how well your site can be browsed by AI agents. Run the Lighthouse test on your site. If your website is not well-formed for accessibility, you will lose one point in this rating.

Run this 2 minute accessibility audit on your site to identify common errors that lead to hundreds of lawsuits each month and can reduce your SEO and AI visibility. If you find issues you don’t know how to fix, contact Elevage Digital for help.