Accessibility Audit

Introduction

I conducted an accessibility audit of mycarebudget.org against WCAG 2.1 Guidelines. These guidelines support accessibility for a variety of visual, auditory, cognitive, and physical disabilities.

This assignment was done for the Inclusive Design course at City, University of London.

POUR principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust.

WCAG 2.1's P.O.U.R. principles visualized by Deque.

Methodology

I manually navigated the site to search for issues against each WCAG 2.1 guideline. I also used VoiceOver, Mac's screenreader application, to help detect issues visually impaired users would face. WAVE and Grayscale tools were further helpful to detect weak color contrast that would reduce the site's readability. As for coding, I used W3C Validator and did a manual code review to check for issues such as missing alt text.
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Comparing what the website looks like in color versus in grayscale.

Comparing mycarebudget in color vs in grayscale. This helps catch objects that wouldn't be noticeable to a colorblind user.

Key Findings

Key issues found on the site concerned 3 main things: a lack of customizability, vague headers/links, and poor color contrast. Customizability supports all users' ability to adjust their screen appearance, clear headers/links help cognitively impaired users navigate, and good color contrast is necessary for readability. Although not as severe, some issues, such as late error messages, also put physically impaired users at risk of using excessive movements.

I compiled these findings into a report which can be used as a guide for mycarebudget.org (*which iteratively improves its design) to improve its accessibility.

*This audit was done in December, 2021. So mycarebudget.org's design has been improved since then.

Sample of Report