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Re: Website Evaluation Frequency

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 23, 2018 3:34PM

I would say that you're asking the wrong question, and that it should really be "what is the best practice for achieving and maintaining a given level of accessibility", because that is presumably what you are actually trying to achieve.

When the question is framed that way, a good starting point is BS8878, which is a governance framework for achieving and maintaining accessibility in an organisation.

https://shop.bsigroup.com/ProductDetail/?pid=000000000030180388&rdt=wmt

https://www.bsigroup.com/LocalFiles/en-GB/consumer-guides/resources/BSI-Consumer-Brochure-Web-Accessibility-UK-EN.pdf

If a website contains more than a few hundred pages, it becomes impossible to maintain good accessibility just by doing periodic audits. It's too large to test manually, yet automated tools can only find a fraction of the issues. It's therefore important to ensure that content is accessible at the point of creation by using measures such as training, policies, CMS rules, pre-publication reviews etc. BS8878 advocates embedding accessibility in an organisation so it is "business as usual" rather than a separate activity that is bolted on to fix things after the event.

If you really are in a position where you can't do any of those things and can only test what's been published, I would probably recommend:

1. Do as large a manual test as you can afford, then fix everything and retest till there are no remaining issues.
2. Use an automated testing tool continuously or at least daily, and fix issues as they arise. At first there will probably be a lot of issues, but eventually the tool will find little or nothing from day to day.
3. Start an internal benchmarking programme by doing a large manual test perhaps every quarter.
4. Where possible, don't just fix the non-compliances, but fix their root causes too.
5. Once the manual tests are showing a level of accessibility you are happy with, reduce their frequency. Increase it if the accessibility starts to decline.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd