7. Web Accessibility Reporting
Template Audit and Audit Walk-Through
A Template Audit is perhaps the most impactful of the different types of audits that will be discussed here.
Purpose of Audit
These audits focus on the common elements throughout a website, such as the navigation, header, footer, menus, and the layout in general. They are often quick to complete, taking only a few hours, and often involve looking at only a single page. There are occasions when multiple templates might be reviewed, such as the home page, which often differs from other pages, as well as one or two unique layouts from other pages on a website.
Process of Audit
In the screenshot below you can see the areas of a page outlined. For a Template Audit, the Main Navigation, the Header (i.e,. Banner), the Side Menu, and the Footer area are reviewed. The Main Content Area would be ignored for now, to be reviewed as part of a General Audit.
Figure: Typical template elements include the header, the side menu, banner, main content area, complementary content, and the footer
Audit Procedure
Using the sample site template displayed in the figure above, examine all the features except the main content area. The following series of tests can be followed to audit the common elements of the template. This same series of tests would be used for General and Detailed Audits as well, but rather than focusing on elements of a single page in the case of a Template Audit, these steps would be followed for each page that is being reviewed as part of an audit.
Visit the Web Accessibility Showcase to follow along while we walk through a page audit. Open the audit template so you can add notes to it as you are following along. Each of the following test strategies include a multimedia alternative to the text of the walk through.
Note regarding the following videos: The videos that appear in the section below are considered to be “media alternatives for text” and as such they do not require captions. The text itself provides the text equivalents for the videos (See Guideline 1.2.2). Nonetheless, we have captioned them here. If you encounter videos used in this way, without captions, they need not be identified in an audit report as a potential barrier, as long as they are listed as media alternatives.
Tab Key Navigation Test
Video: Tab Key Accessibility Testing
- Place the cursor in the top left corner of the page. Begin by pressing the Tab key repeatedly and following the cursor’s path through the template elements. Look for bypass links at the top of the page, and if they are not visible, look at the browser’s status bar at the bottom of the browser window to see if hidden bypass links are present. The URL displayed there should have “#content” on the end of it, or something similar prefixed with the number sign, or hash (#) as it is often referred to. Follow the bypass link(s) by pressing the enter key when they receive focus, to ensure they lead to the main content area, or in some cases to