How Manual Accessibility Testing Improves Your Website

You know your website needs to be accessible for people with disabilities. To create accessible content, you run a few automated tests using various tools to ensure you’re meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Once you’ve fixed the issues you found, you’re done, right?

Wrong.

Automated accessibility testing is a great starting point — but it can’t tick every box. Some barriers require a degree of judgment, and while automation and AI are powerful tools, they’re most effective when content falls within certain patterns. And web content doesn’t always follow the rules.  

The goal of digital accessibility is to improve experiences for real people — and to meet that goal, you need real people to test your content. 

Below, we’ll explain how manual accessibility testing provides a more comprehensive overview of your website’s accessibility. We’ll also explain how a hybrid approach to digital accessibility helps you unlock the full benefits of accessible design without breaking your budget.

What is Manual Accessibility Testing?

Manual accessibility testing is exactly what it sounds like: A real human accesses your website and tests for barriers that might impact users with disabilities. The alternative, automated accessibility testing, uses software to test web content for common barriers. We’ll discuss the advantages of each approach in more detail below.  

Anyone can perform basic manual accessibility tests. Quick, simple ways to test your content include browsing with only a keyboard (no mouse), using a screen magnifier, or installing a screen reader (software that outputs text as audio). 

Professional accessibility audits go much deeper. They should be performed by subject matter experts who use assistive technology regularly.

What Does Manual Website Accessibility Testing Cover?

Automated testing tools are excellent for finding accessibility issues that fail basic rules. For example, if a website contains hyperlinks with missing link text, most automated tools can flag that issue (and, in some cases, resolve it automatically).

But some WCAG criteria require subjective, human judgment. For example, the first WCAG criterion requires a text alternative for all non-text content, and that alternative must “serve the equivalent purpose.” More simply, this means adding alternative text (alt text) to images, labels for data charts, transcripts for audio, etc. so assistive technology users can interact with the content. 

Automated tests may be able to flag images that are missing alt text, but they’ll have trouble determining whether existing alt text “serves an equivalent purpose" — you’d need a human being to review the text and decide whether it’s accurate, concise, and descriptive.

Manual testing provides huge benefits for accessibility compliance: 

• Better accessibility for complex website content: Many modern websites have custom controls, third-party widgets, automatic updates, ARIA markup, and dynamic content that tends to confuse AI accessibility tools. Human testers are better at interpreting complex content and finding the issues that will impact real users.

• Better guidance for fixes: Automated tools might be able to tell you how something is broken and what most websites can do to fix it. But in some situations, developers need specific, actionable feedback — which human experts can provide.

• Verification of accessibility fixes: Expert testers can verify each fix to ensure that it’s implemented properly. That’s an important part of the process. Some issues can be fixed in numerous ways, but one of those methods might be more beneficial for the real humans who use your website.

Ultimately, manual testing improves the results of automation and makes your website significantly more robust. People with disabilities don’t always conform to patterns. They don’t all use screen readers, and the ones that do use screen readers don’t use the same screen readers. They use different devices, browsers, and techniques to access the internet

Put simply, your accessibility testing strategy needs to take those differences into account — manual testing helps you build a more holistic approach.

A purple accessibility symbol, with an icon of a person on the left and a gear on the right.

How is a Manual Website Accessibility Audit Done?

The approach of manual testing will vary depending on who you’re working with. However, most accessibility experts or users with disabilities will test your content to uncover accessibility issues and provide recommendations on how to fix them.

At AudioEye, our expert-led web accessibility audits follow this basic process:

1. Define workflows: We work with our customers to understand the common paths that users take to accomplish key tasks (for example, an e-commerce purchase). 

2. Evaluate workflows: Our first round of testing involves testers accessing each page involved in the workflow path, using popular screen readers like JAWS, NVDA, and Apple VoiceOver to find issues that could impact users. 

3. Test against WCAG: A second round of testing focuses on WCAG Level AA conformance, evaluating the workflow pages against each requirement in the guidelines.

4. Create a log of all accessibility issues: We track details about each issue, including info about how it impacts users, how it fails to conform to WCAG, and how it should function when fixed. We also provide a severity rating to help teams prioritize fixes.

5. Develop custom fixes: AudioEye developers go through each logged accessibility issue and provide guidance on at-source fixes for internal developer teams. 

6. Re-evaluation: We perform another round of expert testing to make sure the barriers are resolved correctly — and to ensure that the website provides a truly accessible experience for users with disabilities.

Our audits include insights from users with disabilities who use assistive technology every day, which provides our clients with 400% more protection and peace of mind that they’re achieving the highest possible level of compliance. 

For a more in-depth look at our manual testing process, read: How AudioEye Conducts Expert Custom Accessibility Testing.

Limits of Manual Accessibility Testing

Manual testing provides indispensable insights into the user experience — but as a standalone WCAG testing strategy, it’s not perfect. 

For starters, extensive manual testing can be expensive. An expert tester must navigate predefined user paths, interact with numerous individual elements, and document their findings and recommendations. A modern e-commerce website might have tens of thousands of pages — meaning the process of testing every single page would quickly get expensive. 

That process can also be time-consuming, and while accessibility isn’t a one-time project with a strict time limit, you want to fix major barriers as quickly as possible.

Manual testing is focused on usability and core functionality. Those are crucial concerns, but you also need to test for issues outside of typical user workflows (for example, on out-of-the-way pages that might serve a few dozen users per month). That’s where automated testing can shine.

Limits of Automated Accessibility Testing

If manual testing is deep but narrow, automated testing is broad but shallow. AI-powered tools can scan every page of your site in a fraction of the time it would take a human, testing for common WCAG violations like low-contrast text, missing alt text, missing page language attributes, insufficient color contrast, and poor use of semantic HTML. 

Of course, this speed comes at the cost of context. Automation cannot reliably determine whether your content makes sense. 

To use our example from earlier, automation can tell you if an image has alt text, but not if that alt text is appropriate for the image. It can’t tell you whether the user experience is frustrating or supportive for folks who use assistive technology. 

A website can pass an automated scan and still be mostly unusable for a real person with a disability. Automation alone cannot guarantee WCAG conformance (or compliance with laws like the ADA).

Illustration of a person interacting with a web accessibility toolbar on a computer screen, featuring various icons and tools.

Hybrid Approach: Automated Audits Boosted by Expert Audits and Fixes 

A hybrid approach to accessibility testing combines the strengths of automation with the critical insights of human experts. That allows you to achieve the best of both worlds:

• Robust compliance: The Department of Justice recommends a hybrid approach for AAA compliance, and the W3C (which publishes WCAG) recommends using both automated and manual methods. 

• User experience: Manual testing by experts, including daily users of assistive technology, ensures your website is not just technically compliant but truly accessible and pleasant to use.

• Lower overall cost: By resolving simple issues with automation and reviewing key pages with experts, you can achieve a high level of accessibility without the significant expense of a page-by-page review.

At AudioEye, we believe that the hybrid model (or “Goldilocks' approach") provides the best path to compliance. We support our customers with a legal guarantee, providing legal expertise and resources should they ever face an accessibility complaint.

Hybrid Website Accessibility Audit: What It Looks Like

So, how does a hybrid audit work in practice?

The standard approach is to run an automated audit of a website, then review the results of that audit. Manual testers then choose a selection of critical pages, test them, and report their findings.

AudioEye’s approach goes further — performing automated tests with every page view. Our Active Monitoring continuously identifies and, in many cases, automatically fixes common issues like text with a low contrast ratio, missing focus indicators, and redundant links.

We supplement our automated testing with Expert Audits, reviewing the most critical and complex user workflows on your site, such as the shopping cart and checkout process, customer login portals, or main navigation menus. 

Our experts provide specific guidance for fixing problems that require a human touch. We perform manual audits on an appropriate schedule, which is dependent on your website's content — simple sites may need occasional audits, while complex, dynamic content may need to be reassessed more frequently. 

Explore How Hybrid Testing Elevates Accessibility Compliance with AudioEye

Manual accessibility testing has a place in enhancing the accessibility and usability of your site. From evaluating the true usability of your digital content for screen readers to spotting complex navigation barriers, hands-on testing can provide much-needed accessibility insight into your content. But it can’t catch everything.

That’s where a hybrid approach shines. By combining the speed and consistency of automated scans with the insight and judgment of human testers, you get the best of both worlds: broader coverage, deeper accuracy, and a clearer path to achieving true accessibility.

Unlocking the benefits of a hybrid approach starts with AudioEye. AudioEye’s three-pronged approach to accessibility combines powerful automation, human-assisted AI technology, and testing during the development process to detect and fix accessibility issues. With our hybrid approach, you can achieve industry-leading compliance with accessibility standards and unlock all the benefits that come with it.

The best way to understand the advantages of a hybrid approach? Experience it for yourself. Schedule a demo to see the process in action.

Not ready to chat? Use our free Website Accessibility Checker to see how accessible your existing content is and start your journey to accessibility.