The 15-minute audit
Six checks, a browser and a keyboard, plus an honest account of what a quarter of an hour cannot tell you.
Two clients this year have asked, more or less out of nowhere, whether their site is accessible.
Neither was asking out of principle. One is a public sector body and there’s a regulation with a deadline in September that their legal team had finally read. The other had seen something about a lawsuit and got twitchy. I’d rather people arrived at this for better reasons, and I’ll take the arrivals.
The problem with the question is that the honest full answer costs several thousand dollars and takes two weeks, and if that’s the first thing you say, most small clients stop there and nothing improves. So I’ve got a 15-minute version, and it’s not an audit in any real sense, and it’s the most useful quarter of an hour I spend on these projects.
What it’s for
Not compliance. Let’s get that out of the way, because the gap between “I found 11 things” and “you conform to a standard” is enormous and it’s the gap somebody eventually gets sued over.
15 minutes tells you two things. Whether the site is in decent shape or alarming shape, which determines whether the next conversation is about a tidy-up or a project. And a list of specific, concrete, undeniable failures, which is the thing that actually moves a client, because “your site scores poorly on WCAG 2.1 AA” moves nobody and “a person using a keyboard cannot get past your cookie banner” moves everybody.
Nothing on the list needs anything installed. I use a browser and the keyboard I’ve already got.
Six checks
Turn the styles off. Most browsers still have a menu for this, and reader mode is a decent approximation. What you’re checking is whether the page in source order makes sense as a document: does the heading structure read like an outline, is the navigation before the content, do the sections come in a sensible order, is there anything that only made sense because it was positioned somewhere. This is 30 seconds and it finds structural problems that no tool reports, because a tool can’t tell whether an outline is sensible, only whether the levels skip.
Tab through it. Everybody knows this one and it’s still the highest-yield thing in the list. From the address bar, tab, and watch. Can you see where you are at every step? Does the order follow the visual layout? Is there a skip link? Can you get into the menu, and back out? Can you reach the footer without going through 60 items? And, the one that catches most sites, can you get out of the modal or the banner or the carousel once you’re in it.
Zoom to 200%, and then 400%. This is newer and it’s the one people forget. The current version of the guidelines expects content to reflow at 400% without a horizontal scrollbar, which in practice means it has to behave like a narrow viewport rather than shrinking a desktop layout. Loads of sites that are fine on a phone fall apart here, because the phone layout is triggered by width and the zoom isn’t hitting the same breakpoints.
Turn images off. All of them, in settings. What’s left is roughly what somebody reading with assistive technology gets, and it is bleak on most sites. Empty spaces where a link used to be, because the link was an image with no alt text and now there’s nothing to click. Nine identical copies of the words “read more.” I wrote a whole post about alt text a few years ago and this is the five-second version of it.
Click the form labels. This one is my favorite because it looks like nothing. Click on the word “Email address,” not the box. If focus jumps into the field, the label is properly associated. If nothing happens, it isn’t, and it’s a <span> sitting near a box, and a screen reader user gets an unlabeled edit field. It takes two seconds per field and it’s a definitive yes-or-no answer about markup you haven’t read.
Look at the placeholders. If a form has no visible labels and uses placeholder text instead, you have found a real problem: the label vanishes when the person starts typing, the contrast is usually terrible by design, and it’s often not announced at all.
Click on the word "Email address" rather than the box. If focus doesn't jump into the field, that's not a label, it's a span sitting nearby.
The two clients find most persuasive
Of everything on that list, two land in a meeting and the rest are noted politely.
The keyboard walkthrough, done live, on a screen, in front of them. Not described. You share your screen, you tab, and everybody watches the focus ring disappear into nowhere for 11 presses. It’s uncomfortable in a way a report isn’t, and it’s fair, because it’s just their site.
And images off, on their own homepage. There’s a specific moment when a marketing director sees that the thing they spent four months on is, to some of their customers, a column of the words “read more” repeated nine times.
I’d add that neither of those is a gotcha, and the tone matters enormously. Nobody in the room did this on purpose. Almost everything I find is not extra work that someone declined to do, it’s ordinary work that got skipped, usually because the person doing it had never been told it existed.
What it can’t tell you
Quite a lot, and I say all of this out loud before I present anything.
It tells you nothing about what the site is actually like to use with a screen reader. I can check that things are labeled; I can’t tell you whether the experience makes sense, and I’m not a daily user of one, and my fumbling around in VoiceOver for ten minutes is not a substitute for asking somebody who lives in it.
It tells you nothing about cognitive accessibility, which is enormous and under-discussed and doesn’t show up in any of the above.
And it can’t tell you about anything behind a login, or in a PDF, or in the parts of the site the client’s team edits daily, which on most projects is where the problems breed.
So the framing I use is: this is a smoke test. If it’s bad, it’s definitely bad. If it’s clean, it might still be bad, and here’s what a real audit involves and what it costs.
Writing it up
Two columns, and this is the part that makes anything happen: what’s wrong, and roughly how big the fix is.
Most of what turns up in 15 minutes is small. A focus style that was removed in a reset and never replaced. Labels that need wiring to their inputs. Alt text on nine images. A skip link. Buttons that are divs. On a normal site, that’s a couple of days.
Putting the effort next to each finding is what stops the list reading as an indictment and starts it reading as a plan, and a plan gets scheduled where an indictment gets forwarded to someone else.
Fifteen minutes
A browser, and a keyboard you already own.
I’d recommend doing it on your own site before you do it on anybody else’s, which is what I did in April, and I found four things and one of them had been there since 2016.