Inaccessible websites create barriers for all your website visitors, not just people with disabilities. But before you can begin fixing accessibility problems, you need to know what – and where – they are. Using an automated website accessibility checker is an efficient way to check a website’s accessibility status and begin your journey towards accessibility compliance.
Your visitors rely on the usability of your website to engage with your brand. In the EU, one in four people live with a disability, and in the US, that figure is 56 million. Poorly designed, inaccessible pages make it difficult for these groups to use your website. Simply put, if your website is not accessible, you are excluding a significant percentage of the global population, which not only threatens disabled people’s rights, but can also have severe consequences for your organization.
The internet features a wide range of testing tools and software programs for website accessibility evaluation. While some companies might be reluctant to invest in a dedicated web accessibility tool, the fact is that creating and maintaining accessible web content in the modern era is too large and difficult a task to be done without automated accessibility test.
Fortunately, accessibility tools, like the Siteimprove website accessibility checker, allow you to tackle the WCAG 2.0 A, AA, AAA barriers that hurt your site experience and brand reputation. Manually auditing hundreds – or even thousands – of pages across your website for accessibility issues takes time, resources, and expertise. Thankfully, website accessibility checkers take care of the heavily lifting, allowing you to check your website’s accessibility status instantly and prioritize pages that need attention with confidence.
That doesn’t mean that manual accessibility testing is a bad idea—in fact, manual testing is an integral part of accessibility testing as not everything can be automated. Automation is a great, cost-effective (you could argue it’s the only financially viable way) for covering large amounts of content quickly whereas manual testing is great for a thorough investigation into a smaller amount of content.