Accessibility Testing Should Reflect the Website People Actually Use

Automated WCAG testing

We run automated accessibility testing against the rendered page — after WordPress, the theme, the plugins and the client-side JavaScript have all finished building the interface. Testing the HTML the server sent would miss most of a modern WordPress site.

This reliably identifies problems such as:

• Missing accessible names
• Missing image alternatives
• Many color contrast failures
• Invalid ARIA
• Form labeling issues
• Viewport restrictions
• Structural markup problems

Automated testing is valuable. It is not complete. No serious accessibility process should pretend otherwise, and we say so on the report rather than in the footnotes.

Keyboard and focus testing

We independently test keyboard traversal and focus behavior, because a page can pass every automated check and still be unusable without a mouse. This reveals:

• Visible controls that cannot be reached with the keyboard
• Focus traps
• Missing visible focus indicators
• Unusual positive tabindex values
• Navigation that only works on hover

These problems are especially common in complex themes, mobile navigation, popups, and interactive plugins — exactly the parts of a site a scanner is least able to reach.

Interactive state testing

Many defects are invisible until something happens. For appropriate sites we drive the important workflows and test the interface after the state changes:

• Opening a mobile menu
• Expanding an accordion
• Opening a dialog
• Submitting an empty contact form
• Interacting with a cookie banner
• Adding a WooCommerce product to the cart
• Selecting product variations
• Progressing through checkout
• Viewing logged-in account screens

This is one of the reasons we do not reduce accessibility testing to a single automated scan of a URL list.

Desktop and mobile

Responsive layouts often create completely different interactive components. A desktop navigation menu may be perfectly accessible while the mobile hamburger menu is not. Controls get reordered, duplicated, hidden, or replaced at different breakpoints.

We test representative mobile and desktop experiences where appropriate.

Authenticated testing

Some important WordPress functionality only exists after login. Depending on the engagement, we can test authenticated roles and protected areas on a safe copy of the site — customer account areas, member sites, learning systems, ecommerce, editor workflows and private portals.

Human review

Some questions cannot be answered reliably by automation. Software can determine that an image has alternative text, but not whether that text communicates the right information. A tool can report the tab sequence, but a person still has to decide whether that sequence makes sense.

Our reports distinguish between automated findings, evidence requiring review, and areas that are outside the scope of automated testing altogether.

Finding problems is useful. Fixing them is the service.

What remediation involves