How does probeo help with accessibility?

Everyone gets this

Accessibility is rarely a project a company starts on schedule. It comes up when someone asks.

Because probeo reads every page it manages anyway, the accessibility check comes with it.

What people usually cannot see

• Which pages fail, and on which rules.
• Which failures are one template repeated across hundreds of pages, and which belong to one page.
• The exact element that fails, so whoever fixes it can find it.

What the standard actually is

Four things are worth knowing before reading any report.

W3C's own evaluation methodology says conformance claims cannot be made for entire websites based on a sample of pages alone.1,2,3,4

• The versions stack rather than replace each other. Content conforming to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to 2.1 and 2.0, and 2.2 does not deprecate 2.1.
• The guidelines sit under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
• There are five conformance requirements, and all must be satisfied: interpreting normative requirements, the conformance level, full pages, complete processes, and non-interference.
• Conformance is not the same as usable by everyone. The specification says content conforming at the highest level will still not be accessible to individuals with all types, degrees or combinations of disability.

What an automated check can and cannot establish

W3C is unusually direct about this, which makes it easy to quote and hard to argue with.

The tooling itself is built around that limit. axe-core returns passes, violations, inapplicable and incomplete, where incomplete means the check was aborted and needs further testing, and not every rule runs by default.5,6,4,7,8,9

• Tools cannot check all accessibility aspects automatically. Human judgment is required.
• Evaluation tools cannot determine accessibility, only assist in doing so, and can sometimes produce false or misleading results.
• No tool alone can determine whether a site meets accessibility standards. Knowledgeable human evaluation is required.
• Most accessibility checks are not fully automatable, per W3C's evaluation methodology.
• Even preliminary checks can pass on a page that still has significant barriers.

What this cannot tell you

An automated check cannot establish that a site is accessible. Much of WCAG needs human judgment, and a page can pass every automated rule and still be hard to use.5,6

What it gives you is everything that can be found automatically, kept current, so human review goes where it is needed.

It cannot tell you that the site conforms. That requires human evaluation, and for a large site a documented sampling method rather than a crawl.

It also cannot settle coverage. W3C publishes no figure for how much of the standard automation can detect. The most quoted number, 57 per cent, is the tool vendor's own measurement of issue volume on its own basis, and even that is contrasted with a widely held belief of 20 to 30 per cent.10

Testing with people with disabilities finds usability problems that conformance evaluation alone does not.11

Questions