These steps provide a high-level view of a recommended way to test a website for accessibility issues.

Step 1: Add Your Site to Siteimprove

Launch Siteimprove, the university's evaluation tool for web accessibility, and add your website. Siteimprove can be used at no cost by staff and faculty for websites related to official university business, or in support of the university mission.

If your site is publicly available, Siteimprove will scan it, create a cached version, and generate a priority list of web pages that need the most attention. More about using Siteimprove

If your site is protected/secure, Siteimprove won't be able to scan it. However, the Siteimprove CMS Plug-In for Google Chrome (a Firefox version is currently in development) will allow you to evaluate your protected/secure site using a page-by-page approach, rather than a complete site scan). The plug-in version does not flag HTML validation errors, PDFs, or other media. Use other available tools to aid in these areas.

Step 2: Manual Testing

Once Siteimprove identifies your site’s priority pages, these pages–at a minimum–should be the focus of your manual testing. In addition, we suggest testing your home page and any other pages that require user interaction with content.

Screen Reader Testing

On Windows, use JAWS (Job Access With Speech) or NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access). On a Mac, use VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reading utility.

Manual Keyboard Navigation and Shortcuts Testing

Disconnect your mouse and use only the keyboard to navigate your website.

Color Contrast Analyzer

Use the Color Contrast Analyzer (or similar tools).

Additional Areas to Review Manually

Set your site to disable all images, and examine how the content changes.

To comply with robust testability requirements, your site should be checked for HTML and CSS errors, along with making sure it’s responsive when viewed on different devices. In general, accessibility-compliant sites are user friendly and search engine optimized (SEO).

For more information on web accessibility testing, please refer to WebAIM and WebAIM's Checklist.