Question: When is the worst time to do your first accessibility audit?
Answer: Immediately after you receive a demand letter from a law firm
No matter how good your accessibility maturity is, something will turn up in an audit.
– The alt text that your social media or press release people forgot
– The colors that a design team convinced product stakeholders were “so on trend” but didn’t pass color contrast checking
– Regressions, where accessibility bugs were previously fixed, followed by those fixes then getting stepped on the next time someone touched the code
And through it all, the plaintiff’s attorneys may be watching from the shadows. Because believe me, they ran the automated tests long before your organization got flagged as a potential plaintiff.
Don’t be the organization that presumes everything is fine because everyone has received training. Employee turnover and third party vendors can seriously damage otherwise OK accessibility.
Settin up an audit policy and sticking to it is the best way to avoid unpleasant accessibility surprises.
alt: Community fire pizza meme. The top half of the graphic is a narrow shot of a young man walking into an apartment with several pizza boxes with the text “Getting Ready to Start the Accessibility Audit” Bottom half of the meme is a wide shot of the apartment with someone holding a flame thrower with the text “missing alt text” a fire in the middle of the floor labeled “bad color choices”, several people hiding in the corner labeled “regressions” and someone standing behind the kitchen counter labeled “lawyers”.