Testing website accessibility (WCAG / ADA compliance) using Scrutiny

No software can test your website and declare it ADA, or more specifically WCAG, compliant because some of the checks need to be made by a human or are subjective.

For example, is a heading, title or link text meaningful? Only a human can judge. But software can tell you whether headings and title of a reasonable length are present and thus report pages of possible concern.

Having said that, there are certain very important things that automated testing does do very well, such as checking for images without alt text.

With that in mind, here is a list of the ways that Scrutiny can help. The checkpoint numbers relate to the WGAC 2.0 requirements.



Alt text (1.1.1):  "non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative" (level A)

• Scrutiny can report images without alt text

Adaptable website structure (1.3.1, 1.3.2): Properly marked up and well-organised headings  (level A) and
Section headings (2.4.10) "Section headings are used to organize the content." (level AAA)

• Scrutiny can report pages with more than one h1 tag. For a specific page, it can show you the outline (ie just the headings, indented)

• Scrutiny's Robotize feature can display a 'text-only' view of a web page and let you browse the site, with headings and links listed separately. This is a good way to test this checkpoint.

Keyboard accessible (2.1): "Make all functionality available from a keyboard."

• if Scrutiny crawls a website fully (particularly with the 'run js' option switched off) then the navigation links are correctly-formed hyperlinks and it should be possible to tab through them using a keyboard and therefore navigate the site. (NB Scrutiny does not currently test / report form fields or buttons)

Page titles (2.4.2): "Web pages have titles that describe topic or purpose." "The title of each Web page should: Identify the subject of the Web page, Make sense when read out of context, Be short"  (level A)

• Scrutiny can report pages which have a non-unique title, and pages which have a title which is too short / too long.

Link text (2.4.4): "The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context" (level A)

• Scrutiny can report empty links as bad links (this option defaults to off, needs to be switched on)
• Scrutiny makes it easier to check manually for meaningful link text.  Cast your eye down the 'link text' column of the links / flat view (or sort the table by this column) and look for link text that doesn't explain the purpose of the link.

Descriptive headings and labels (2.4.6): "Headings and labels describe topic or purpose."  "Determine if the Web page contains headings. Check that each heading identifies its section of the content." (level AA)

• Scrutiny can report pages with no h1
• Scrutiny can include headings (h1's h2's etc in separate columns) in the SEO report to make it easier to scan them by eye and pick out non-descriptive ones

Parsing (4.1.1): Make sure HTML code is clean and free of errors, particularly missing bracket closes. Also, make sure all HTML elements are properly nested.

• Scrutiny provides a way to validate the html code for a specific page using the w3c validator. Your website is likely to be template-based (ie the code for the design of the page is likely to be identical throughout the site) then validating the home page (and certain other pages if the design varies for differnet types of page) is a good indication of validation throughout the site.
• Since version 10, Scrutiny runs more html validation tests of its own over every page while scanning.