Ask

Project Overview

99 Cents Only wanted to improve their adherence to the web accessibility standards set forth in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. In addition, they wanted us to test against an accessibility audit that was completed for them by another agency and see if the findings from the former agency had been implemented.

Purpose of WCAG 2.1

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 was developed in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.

WCAG 2.1 consists of thirteen guidelines organized into four principles: that websites must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Each guideline has testable success criteria, ranging from A - AAA success levels:

●  Level A - Baseline level for accessibility compliance that all websites should adhere to. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

●  Level AA - This level of accessibility is the benchmark for many websites and would allow individuals with assistive devices to browse and interact with digital products. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.

●  Level AAA - The most difficult level of accessibility to reach but provides complete accessibility. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

For this accessibility audit, we focused primarily on A (basic) and AA (advanced) levels of success.

Outcome

Results and Report

From our audit we found that 99 Only has a few areas on its site that do not meet the WCAG 2.1 A and AA guidelines. We created a spreadsheet that went into detail about the guidelines violated by 99 Only. We recommended a phased approach prioritizing WCAG 2.1 A compliance and universally used items including header and footer content. Then moving on to improvements required for WCAG 2.1 AA and addressing lower priority warnings.

In addition, we completed a readability assessment of 99 Only and found that the site had an average readability grade level of 7. This means that the overall website should be easily understood by people with a seventh grade education. It is standard practice to try and keep your website from being too jargon heavy or filled with overly complex words. 

In order to give an accurate assessment on the overall amount of time needed to complete remediation tasks, we split all accessibility errors into three separate categories: critical, moderate and low. 

The critical errors have the highest impact and were perceived to be ones that would need ample time to remedy, moderate errors were considered to be those that would have an intermediate impact on website accessibility and wouldn’t necessarily need as much time as the critical errors to fix. Lastly, the errors that were placed within the low category were ones that would not have a great impact on navigating the website but would still need to be fixed in order to be deemed accessible at a WCAG 2.1 level. My team reviewed of the former audit that was completed for 99 Only, and came to the conclusion that while multiple items of varying severity have been fixed, there are still a great number of violations and issues that were not been remediated. They included 9 minor violations, 10 moderate violations, as well as 6 critical violations. We documented these remaining violations and ensured that they would be tackled by development team during remediation.

Once all errors were categorized, we began to calculate the time needed for remediation of all errors and came up with the following ranges: 

Critical Errors: 36-62 hours needed

Moderate Errors: 32-56 hours needed 

Low Errors: 38-52 hours needed

Overall: 106-170 hours needed