What your accessibility scanner cannot tell you

Hi again 👋

A question for you this week: what does your accessibility scanner tell you?

If you have one running, whether it came with your platform or a developer set it up, it is doing useful work. It will catch missing alt text, low contrast, or an unlabelled field. Those are real problems worth fixing, and it will find them faster than any person could.

Here is the part I find interesting though. A scanner can only measure what a machine is able to see.

So it cannot tell you whether someone can choose a size without a mouse. It cannot tell you whether your size guide opens a panel they can get back out of again. And it cannot tell you whether that error message: “please select a size”, ever reaches somebody who cannot see it turn red.

Those are three of the most common places I see a sale stop dead, and a 100% accessibility score has nothing to say about any of them.

Which is why, after your automated accessibility scanner has finished, the next most useful accessibility test you can do needs no tool at all. It needs you, five minutes, and your best selling product page.

Put the mouse to one side. Buy something using only Tab, the arrow keys and Enter, all the way through to the order confirmation. You know your store far better than any scanner does, so you will feel it immediately when something is not right.

I would genuinely like to know how you get on. Where did it get awkward?

Next time: if the error message that only exists in red, why some of your customers never hear it.

Talk soon,
Dave

P.S. If you get stuck partway through, hit reply and tell me where. I read every reply.