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Evaluating & Testing Web Content

Checking your website for accessibility isn’t just a "one-and-done" task - it’s a commitment to your end users who may be current students, prospective students, employees, or the general public. While automated tools can find technical errors, only a human can tell if a page is truly usable and accessible.

Web Accessibility Standards

Before we dive into testing, it’s important to understand exactly what we are measuring against. Web standards are a set of universal blueprints and rules designed to ensure that the internet works consistently for everyone, regardless of the browser, device, or assistive technology they use to log on.

The global standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). To ensure equitable access across our campuses, the California Community Colleges (CCC) system is legally required, at a minimum, to meet the WCAG 2.1 Level AA standard. The current version of WCAG is 2.2 and while not required, the Accessibility Center recommends coding to the WCAG 2.2 AA standards for enhanced accessibility.

The Accessibility Center recommends a hybrid approach to verifying a website’s accessibility so individuals with disabilities have equitable access throughout the system.

Automated tools are like a spellchecker for your website. They are fast and find large volumes of issues, but they only catch about 20-30% of accessibility barriers (like missing alt-text or low color contrast). 

The Accessibility Center has acquired the Pope Tech Website Scanning Tool to help colleges and districts perform automated testing. The tool can scan an entire department or college website and provide a high level view of errors that need immediate attention. Learn more about or request access to the Pope Tech Web Tool.

We recommend organizations resolve all automated errors first so they don’t distract from the deeper manual review.

Manual testing (or human evaluation) goes beyond automated checkers and catches the remaining 70-80% of accessibility issues. By performing keyboard-only interactions, testing zoom, and content tests, we can verify that a website is functionally accessible to real people.

Picking Pages to Test (Sampling)

Since manual testing is resource-intensive, we recommend a strategic approach to picking which pages to test on a website. Focus on a representative sample (4-5 pages) of your website's pages and use analytics to identify top-visited pages. An example of applying this strategic approach to a college website would result in picking these pages:

  1. Homepage
  2. Key User Flow or 2nd most popular page
  3. Content-Heavy Page 
  4. Random Page

Manual Testing Resources

To evaluate your selected pages, you can either follow a structured checklist or use guided testing via software.

Guided Testing: If you use the Pope Tech Website Scanning Tool, you can leverage its built-in manual testing features. The tool will actively walk you through each selected page and prompt you on what to look for. 

To get started, you can explore the Pope Tech Manual Testing Documentation or review the step-by-step slides from our recent Accessibility Center Presentation.

Manual Checklist: If you prefer to audit the page manually, here are some checklist resources: 

California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office Home Page

Inquiries about the CCC Accessibility Center may be directed to: accessibility@ccctechcenter.org

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