A Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Web Accessibility Audit

At its core, accessibility is about designing and building digital experiences that people, including those with disabilities, can use effectively. Making a digital product accessible is a process, not something that happens overnight. The first part of that process is an accessibility audit to gauge where your website currently is.

A well-structured accessibility audit delivers a clear, high-level view of the digital property’s status for stakeholders, while providing detailed, well-organized reports that guide your accessibility journey beyond a simple list of issues. It allows your team to prioritize remediation based on your goals, focusing on the most important improvements while creating a sustainable roadmap for the future.

 If you're evaluating how to approach an accessibility audit or comparing vendors, our upcoming webinar explains what organizations should expect from a WCAG accessibility audit, what questions to ask, and how to evaluate different approaches.
Register for the webinar: What to Look for in a WCAG Accessibility Audit → 

Read more about how I tell my clients how they should conduct their web accessibility audits

A Clear Scope and Methodology

An accessibility audit is a strategic view of your digital experience, identifying barriers for users, and highlighting areas of potential legal exposure. A solid audit:

• Focuses on critical user journeys first, prioritizing areas of the site that serve the largest number of users or support essential tasks.
• Addresses systemic issues in templates, headers, and components that propagate barriers across the site.
• Identifies early wins to build momentum and reduce exposure
• Documents efforts, providing a baseline for progress tracking and demonstrating due diligence.
  

See how UsableNet's audits make finding and fixing web accessibility easy

Step 1: Define the scope and Objectives

The first thing we tell our clients to do is figure out their audit goals. This will shape the scope, time, and resources you will need to allocate for accessibility. Considerations include:

• Determining which websites, applications, or digital assets will be audited.
• Engaging stakeholders across design, development, QA, and legal teams.
• Establishing compliance standard(s): WCAG 2.2 AA for ADA Compliance, EN 301 549 for European Accessibility Act Compliance, other global standards you might need to comply with.

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Step 2: Initial Audit - Automation plus Targeted Manual Review

Start your audit with a combination of automated testing and targeted manual testing to identify early wins:

• Automated testing: Using a tool like our Accessibility testing platform to quickly flag automated issues.
• Targeted manual testing: Because a comprehensive accessibility audit covering the full WCAG guidelines requires significant time and effort, it can be helpful to first focus on the one or two pages with the most traffic, or those you feel are most relevant, to deliver immediate, actionable findings, set realistic expectations, inform stakeholders quickly, and allow early improvements before the full audit validates implementation.
• Identify early wins: Quick, meaningful fixes on high-severity issues help build momentum and immediately improve the overall user experience, while also laying the groundwork for broader remediation.

This initial approach helps teams gain traction and begin showing tangible improvements fast.

 We cover this in detail in our upcoming session on how to evaluate accessibility audits and testing approaches. Join the webinar to learn what to expect from a WCAG accessibility audit → 

Step 3: Expand the Audit - Broader Site Coverage

Your initial audit should focus on a very small scope. This early phase is about setting the right mindset, helping the team understand what accessibility remediation involves, and clarifying how it may affect timelines, so everyone is prepared for what comes next. It also gives you the opportunity to apply lessons learned from this first review to similar pages, templates, and components across the site before progressing to the full audit. Once those issues are addressed, you are ready to move into the second phase.

At this stage, you can repeat the audit, this time expanding it to cover the full Web Content Accessibility Guidelines across what we call a representative sample, a carefully selected set of pages, templates, and user flows that collectively reflect the different layouts, components, interactions, and content types used across your website.

Testing every single page isn't reasonable or feasible. However, by choosing a meaningful and well-structured representative sample, you can still achieve high coverage, ensure consistency, identify anything missed in the initial phase, and verify that accessibility remains strong as you scale beyond the most critical paths.

Once this phase is complete, you can continue with additional pages or refine the representative sample to include different sections of the site. This iterative approach helps your accessibility program scale effectively across your entire digital experience.

Step 4: Prioritize and Document Issues with Actionable Guidance

Since you are now focusing on a broader scope, you need to provide the necessary context to guide remediation. This includes outlining a set of parameters to define an action plan, along with consistent documentation of the issues, which is essential for the subsequent phases:

• Critical user journeys: Prioritize issues that have the greatest impact on users’ ability to achieve key goals or access important content.

• Job Role Filters: Group issues by role so developers, designers, and content teams can quickly focus on what’s most relevant to their work.

• Impact parameters: Document key details for each issue, such as severity, complexity, responsibility, technology, applicable success criteria, whether duplicated, user need, and affected HTML elements.

• Practical guidance: Include team-specific guidance where relevant:

  • Technical fixes for developers, including code examples
  • Design adjustments for designers to fix patterns or improve readability
  • Content advice for copy clarity and accessibility
  • Suggested remediation timelines to help prioritize effort and track progress

This approach ensures issues are prioritized based on user impact, grouped meaningfully for the team, and documented with actionable, role-specific guidance.

Step 5: Document Findings and Track Progress

Consistent and robust documentation helps maintain momentum and demonstrate due diligence:

• Detailed audit reports showing issues, severity, and recommended fixes.
• Remediation logs tracking progress and accountability.
• Audience-specific reporting: high-level summaries for executives, detailed technical guidance for developers, actionable insights for designers.
• Baselines for future audits and ongoing monitoring
• Annually Scheduled Audits to track overall progress, assess department performance, spot new or recurring issues, pinpoint training needs, and verify that improvements are implemented correctly.

Step 6: Conduct Re-Audits and Ongoing Monitoring

Accessibility is a continuous process:

• Schedule periodic audits to catch new issues and ensure compliance.
• Use monitoring tools to detect regressions or emerging barriers.
• Track progress and celebrate improvements by highlighting comparisons over time, recognizing completed remediation efforts, and showcasing successes to maintain momentum and keep teams engaged.
  

Partnering for Success

An audit alone is not enough to implement accessibility across your organization. Accessibility requires constant testing, fixing, and validation of fixes to ensure everyone can use your website. Although it might seem like a lot, accessibility doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

Partnering with UsableNet ensures expert guidance through the entire accessibility journey: auditing, prioritization, remediation, and ongoing monitoring. Our support helps you:

• Focus on what matters most for users and compliance.
• Build internal expertise to embed accessibility into your culture.
• Reduce risk while improving real-world usability.

Partner with UsableNet today to start your accessibility journey.