Bet Hannon Talks Accessibility Audits on How I Built It

Traditionally, an accessibility audit would look at every single page in detail and give you a detailed report of every single page of your website. And as you might imagine, that’s a labor-intensive thing because that’s a lot of work. So even if you have a moderate-sized site, it could run you into tens of thousands of dollars. And so what we discovered is that, by and large, if you have problems on with accessibility on your site, you can catch a lot of those with a sample of your content. So we developed an audit that was taking a sample of your content, and then you as the site owner can get this report. And then you have to extrapolate from there.

WordPress Accessibility

Bet Hannon appeared on How I Built It, a podcast hosted by Joe Casabona.

Bet spoke about the importance of accessibility, how automated services to find accessibility problems are great but they still require human beings to catch the 70% of issues the AI can’t find, and how we do Accessibility Audits.

Technology Cannot Do It All

Bet articulated why it’s important to use more than just automated tools for checking the accessibility of your site. “The important thing to remember about them is that they only catch about 30% of the accessibility issues. And you may get some false positives and false negatives. And you’ll always need humankind of… you’ll need to look at things with a human eye. Those testing tools are never going to be enough to say that you’re fully accessible. So, for instance, an AI tool can tell you “yes or no, there’s an alt tag for this image.” Yes is good, No is bad. But if the alt tag is the name of the file, jpg49678, that’s not compliant. So it can give you the false negative that you had all the alt tags are taken care of when they’re not really.”