Audits
Audits are conducted using a range of methods with varying degrees of accuracy and scope. Ranging from automated tools that can test an entire site in a few minutes to auditors manually reading website code line by line. The goal of every audit is to give our customers a realistic and representative understanding of how compliant and accessible an ICT solution is. In addition, we aim to give our customers an in-depth understanding of which issues exist and what one should do to mitigate said issues.
The audits cover WCAG 2.1 and success criteria of level A and A. Level AAA requirements are excluded from our audits and are not covered by most legislation requiring WCAG 2.1 compliance.
Our audits are available for both webpages, Android, and iOS apps, as well as for documents. Beyond evaluating, documenting solutions, and giving a compliance score, our audits always include a summary where we highlight repeated errors and errors that have a significant impact on the user experience and accessibility of the webpage, app, or document.
Inklud uses a combination of methods to perform our audits. Automated tools play a supporting role, but the vast majority of auditing work is done manually. We use manual inspections as our main method because experience has shown that automated tools only find certain types of issues, often produce false positives, and give a false sense of compliance.
Beyond these approaches, we also rely on the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0 (w3.org), an internationally acknowledged methodology for how to perform and approach accessibility audits of web solutions. This methodology also helps with narrowing the scope and ensuring that the most important parts of a web service are covered during an audit. Below you can read more about how we conduct audits.
Expert evaluation
Expert evaluation, also referred to as manual testing, means that our certified experts go through a representative set of pages using assistive tools such as screen readers and inspect the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to identify issues that end users might experience. The front-end code is analyzed by HTML experts, and real solutions to identified problems are explained and documented.
While all Inklud employees use screen readers regularly, testing is also done with real blind users to ensure that findings made by experts reflect the real experiences had by blind users.
An audit of a website for us usually includes documents such as PDF, Excel, and Word files of notice. These documents are audited the same way as websites, using real assistive tools and expert inspection of elements.
Automated testing
During automated auditing, we use automated tools to scan potentially thousands of pages for accessibility issues. Results are analyzed by experts and rewritten into as understandable English as possible.
The results of automated tools cover specific parts of WCAG better than others, most notably the parts that have to do with robustness. Robust in a WCAG context means that things should be coded using modern web standards with correct attributes, values, and elements.
Contact us to learn more
If you want an audit of your ICT solution or have questions regarding pricing, methodology, or anything else, please do contact us at kontakt@inklud.no.