Digital accessibility is becoming increasingly important – not only due to legal requirements such as the German Accessibility Improvement Act (BFSG), but also to enable an inclusive user experience. But how do you find out whether your website is accessible? There is a simple and free solution, especially for smaller websites: the WAVE tool. In this article, you will learn how to test your website for accessibility with WAVE and what measures you can take to fix existing problems.
Why is accessibility important?
An accessible website is accessible to everyone – regardless of physical limitations. People with visual impairments, motor impairments or other disabilities can benefit from an optimized website. In addition, accessibility improves usability for all users and contributes to search engine optimization (SEO).
The WAVE tool: Simple accessibility check
The free analysis tool WAVE is operated by the WebAIM Institute at the University of Utah and is one of the best solutions for checking the accessibility of a website quickly and easily.
Step 1: Call up WAVE
Visit the WAVE website and enter the URL of your website in the address field. Note that WAVE can only check individual pages. If your website consists of several subpages, you should test representative pages.
Step 2: Understanding analysis results
After the analysis, WAVE displays different categories of results:
- Errors: These are urgent to fix as they make it considerably more difficult or impossible to use your website. A common error is, for example, “empty links” that have no alternative texts.
- Contrast errors (contrast errors): These affect the legibility of texts. WAVE points out places where the color contrast is not sufficient. If adjusting the contrast would compromise the corporate design, an alternative solution, such as contrast adjustment using third-party tools, may be useful.
- Alerts (warning notices): These indicate potential problems that you should check manually. One example is the notification that a video requires a transcription.
Here you will find a list of errors, contrasting errors and warnings. These points are relevant for you. Features, structural elements and the accessible rich items (ARIA) are only displayed for the sake of completeness.
Step 3: Correct the error
- Errors: The main task of accessibility is to keep your site “error-free”. These are clear malfunctions that are usually also problematic for healthy people or search engines. In the screenshot, for example, you can see “empty links” – links without alternative texts. Such errors often occur when anchor links are placed within the website. In our case, it is an arrow that scrolls down the page slightly when clicked. If you click on the error message, you can see what is wrong on your website. Fix this error by logging into your website and setting an alternative text under the link. Do the same with all errors.
- Contrast errors: Contrast errors are almost impossible to correct without third-party software. Maximum contrast is required for accessible websites. However, if your website is not to be designed in black and white, you may have to accept this error.
If you want to be on the safe side, you can use third-party software such as DigiAccess, which allows restricted users to customize the contrast without having to change your corporate design.
- Alerts (warnings): Alerts are warnings that you should look at. Under the “i” symbol, you can see what the reason for the alert is. Not every alert is also an error. For example, the “HTML5 Video or Audio” alert indicates that video or audio content requires a transcript if it contains spoken words. If you already have the transcript or the video does not contain any audio components, you can ignore the alert.
We recommend that you go through all alerts and decide on a case-by-case basis which ones you want to process, ignore or include in the accessibility statement.
Step 4: Adapt accessibility statement
If certain adjustments are not possible for technical or design reasons, for example, if the contrast cannot be adjusted due to the corporate design, you should document this in an accessibility statement. In this way, you inform users transparently about existing restrictions and possible alternatives.
Conclusion: Test and improve accessibility
With WAVE, you can quickly and easily check how accessible your website is. Especially for smaller websites, the tool is an excellent solution for implementing initial measures without additional costs. Continuous optimization not only helps to meet legal requirements, but also makes your website more accessible for all users.