Auditing a Corporate Site for Accessibility

"WCAG compliance" sounds like a checklist. In practice, it starts with a tool flagging real problems on a real page, then figuring out which of those problems actually matter to a real person.

Where I Started: WAVE

I ran the corporate site through WAVE, WebAIM's accessibility evaluation tool, which flags errors, contrast issues, alerts, and structural problems directly on the live page. The summary view is a useful triage tool on its own: errors and contrast errors need fixing outright, alerts need a judgment call, and the structural element count tells you how much markup you're actually working with.

Contrast got its own pass. WAVE's contrast checker compares foreground and background color against WCAG's AA and AAA thresholds for both normal and large text, so a color pairing that looked fine on screen could still fail the actual standard. I fixed what failed, not what merely looked close.

Beyond Pass/Fail: Who's Actually Affected

A checklist tells you what's broken. It doesn't tell you who that breaks it for. I used vision-type simulations, covering everything from full color blindness to low vision to cataracts, to see the site the way a meaningful share of visitors actually would, not just the way an automated scanner reports it.

I also looked at situational vision events: direct sunlight on a phone screen, night mode. Accessibility isn't only about permanent conditions. A color pairing that passes contrast checks can still be unreadable outdoors at noon, and that's a real user experience, not an edge case.

The Result

Fixing accessibility issues after launch is expensive and reactive. Treating them as a design requirement, checked with the same rigor as a broken link, catches them before they ship.