How to conduct an accessibility marketing audit

An accessibility audit consists of a series of assessments carried out by accessibility specialists, using various accessibility tools and assistive technologies. This form of testing helps to reveal any barriers that are currently preventing disabled people from using and interacting with your content effectively.

The abilities of your audience will likely be incredibly diverse. An accessibility audit will consider the experience from the point of view of those with:

• Vision impairments
• Auditory impairments
• Motor impairments
• Cognitive impairments
• Speech impairments

An experienced accessibility consultant will carry out the audit with a proven methodology, ensuring that your audit report is highly accurate and clearly indicates what improvements need to be made to reach your desired audience.

Your audit report will include a comprehensive overview of any specific issues identified, a clear justification of why they make your content inaccessible, and a clear explanation for what the suggested improvement is and how it can be achieved.

This report will indicate how many of the required standards set out in WCAG 2.1 (comprehensive digital accessibility guidelines) that you meet across your marketing assets - as well as those you currently don’t.

Although a marketing audit may suggest changes to typefaces or colour combinations, these will still need to work within the parameters of your brand guidelines. For this reason, we’ll always ensure that we’ve got one eye on our client’s brand guidelines before carrying out the audit, making sure that any amendments or improvements we suggest don’t go against these.

In some cases, it may be more effective to make minor adjustments to the brand guidelines to reduce the need for additional accessible versions of existing resources. This can be more cost effective and achieve better brand consistency in the long term. Your accessibility consultant will outline the various options with you to ensure your short and long-term requirements are met.

If you’re ready to take your first step on your organisation’s accessibility journey, why not get started with an accessibility audit? We’ve worked with a broad range of clients across the public, not-for-profit and higher education sectors to carry out accessibility audits, so we have a wealth of experience under our belts.

If you’d like more information on accessibility audits and would like to start your accessibility journey with us at the helm, get in touch with our team today and we’ll be happy to help.