Customer case: WCAG audit - accessibility of a theater website

The digital accessibility audit of the theatre's website, included WCAG 2.1 compliance testing of the site and testing with a user with a disability. The whole project had to close within a fairly limited time and budget.

For each of the accessibility issues found, it was also necessary to provide clear recommendations for the developers so that those responsible for the website could quickly and efficiently correct the problems detected.

During the audit, we adopted a standard path for carrying out this type of project, consisting of several stages:

1. Preliminary activities to familiarise ourself with the service and define the scope of the audit.

2. Technical accessibility testing - verification of compliance with WCAG 2.1 at AA level.

3. Tests carried out by visually impaired users using screen readers.

Preliminary activities 

This stage is essential when carrying out an audit. It is in this part of the project that the technical auditor familiarises himself with the entire website, checks what functionality it offers and identifies the sub-pages that should be subjected to accessibility tests first. This approach makes it possible to eliminate most accessibility problems from the website in the first iteration of tests and improvements, including fixing errors that occur on sub-pages that have not been tested.

The output from this stage of the project is the scope of the audit: a list of sub-pages of the website that should be tested against WCAG 2.1 compliance and by end-users with disabilities.

During the audit of the theatre's website, 9 sub-pages were selected for WCAG 2.1 level AA compliance testing and 8 sub-pages were selected for testing with visually impaired users. Already during these preliminary activities, we learned that we could expect a number of accessibility issues on the site.

Verification of compliance with WCAG 2.1

Having selected the range of pages to be tested, we moved on to testing compliance with WCAG 2.1. As the site is publicly co-funded, it was necessary to ensure that it complied with the requirements contained in the Annex of the Act on Digital Accessibility of Public Entities' Websites and Mobile Applications. This annex contains 49 of the 50 WCAG 2.1 success criteria at level AA, and it was these criteria that were examined during this stage of the audit. The website contains a lot of different types of components, including more complex ones such as carousels, video and audio players and ticket purchase forms. For this reason, as many as 41 success criteria were found to be applicable to the service and should be examined by us.

For each of the accessibility problems found, in addition to a detailed description and a screenshot/recording showing the problem, we also added recommendations how to eliminate the defect and ensure the accessibility of the given component. Each problem was reported in a checklist attached to the report and also in the ticketing system used by the developers, Trello. As problems were reported in Trello on an ongoing basis, the developer was able to see the issues and recommendations for improvement before receiving the entire report at the end of the project.

Testing with users with disabilities 

In parallel with the compliance tests, we also conducted tests with visually impaired users. During this part of the audit, two testers conducted exploratory tests of selected subpages using the operating system and screen reader they use on a daily basis. These systems and readers were Windows 11 with JAWS, and macOS 13.3 with VoiceOver, respectively. Each tester was tasked with describing the elements on the site that, in their opinion, did not work properly, and then together with the technical tester we developed recommendations for improving the blind user's experience.