NAVIGATION

Conducting an Accessibility Audit

Goal of Accessibility Validation
The goal of the accessibility audit is to ensure that your website is accessible for people with disabilities. This is not limited to the visually and hearing impaired, but to anyone who has a disability and who uses your website.

Audit Process

1. Determine the scope
	When possible, an agency should validate all content on their website. This includes HTML pages, photos, images and any other content available to the public. However, due to the large amount of content published, some agencies may choose to audit a "representative sample" for accessibility. "Representative sample" of web content includes the following:
	All pages on which people are likely to enter your site, such as home page or welcome page or landing pages
	All terminal content and document download files with over 1000 pages views/month
	A minimum of 50% of terminal content and document download files with over 100 page views per month
	A variety of pages with tables, diagrams, graphs or photos
	All forms
	All multimedia content
The goal is to validate content on different styles or types of pages to ensure that they are accessible. Use your web metrics reports to ensure that you include all of your top requested web pages, as well as your top requested document downloads.

2. Assemble Team Members
	Team members should include the agency webmaster and personnel responsible for posting content to the agency's website. Subject matter experts should be included to help validate their web content. Once completed, VASTEC will submit the audit verification form.
	Establish a work group and clear responsibilities
	Establish a communication plan and timeline
	Identify a reporting method and issue a tracking mechanism
	Identify a high-level champion or spokesperson for Web accessibility

3. Conduct an Audit
	Conduct a quick initial review of pages, files, and photos to identify potential problem areas by navigating your website without images, sound, or JavaScript enabled, and without using your mouse
	Using the representative sample of your website, validate against each standard
	Validation procedures in this toolkit are here to provide sample techniques; agencies may choose different methods, provided they test to the same standards
	Conduct the validation and document your findings
	Complete the Audit Checklist

4. Develop a Remediation Plan
	Prioritize your problem areas in descending order of criticality. Estimate resources required to address your problem areas and develop short and long-term remediation plans. This may need to include changes to your workflow processes to ensure testing is done prior to posting new content and training of employees, particularly content creators, to ensure they understand the requirements.