UX Audit to Help a Website Prepare for WCAG Conformance Certification
Customer
The Customer is a European IT company that offers business software solutions for enterprises. They have a website with ~100 pages, aimed at both customers and employees.
Challenge
The Customer wanted to have their website pass the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 conformance test and obtain official certification. The Customer needed a third-party evaluation of the state of their website to minimize the risk of retaking the test.
Solution
The Customer turned to ScienceSoft for usability testing and the audit of UX design. Due to the considerable size of the website, it was decided to determine 10 key types of pages – such as ‘Dashboard’, ‘Personal Calendar’, ‘Booking’, etc. – and provide their detailed analysis against the WCAG requirements.
In terms of 1 week, ScienceSoft’s UX expert performed thorough usability testing by checking each of the 10 selected website pages of each of the 10 types against the 4 key principles of WCAG: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. In total, each page required 44 steps to be fully tested.
All test results were recorded and compiled in a report. For any test that brought unfavorable results, ScienceSoft described the issues and provided recommended actions for fixing them. For example, some pages failed the 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 WCAG requirements as they had elements with mixed language use. The expert uncovered the issues with the ‘lang’ parameter and described how to fix them.
ScienceSoft’s UX expert also analyzed the selected pages from the point of view of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics. The final report contained a table with the pass/fail mark for each page in regards to each of the 10 usability quality criteria. Detailed recommendations were provided for the pages that didn’t comply with the requirements.
Results
The Customer has obtained a detailed UX report helping them prepare for passing the WCAG 2.0 conformance test. They are currently working on fixing all the minor issues and plan to turn to ScienceSoft for the assistance in fixing more serious ones.
Methodologies
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requirements, Jacob Nielsen’s heuristics.
