The Harmonic Northwest Website Accessibility Audit
January 1st, 2025 by Gage Pacifera
Today in company news: Harmonic Northwest is now offering website accessibility audits as a service.
The audit entails running some automated tests on your website and more importantly, non-automated tests done by a real human, to produce a report containing a detailed checklist of items you’ll need to fix to bring your site into WCAG 2.2 AA compliance. We aim to provide this service at an affordable price to companies large and small.
But Why?
Why is accessibility important, you may ask? Well, firstly, because access to information is a human right. Measures to make websites accessible are important for the same reasons that installing wheelchair ramps in front of building entrances and adding audio to crosswalk signals are important—they help ensure everybody has access to the benefits provided by our society.
Beyond that, it turns out that making websites accessible to folks who have sensory disabilities usually makes them easier for everybody else to access, as well. Those captions that are put on videos for folks who can’t hear? Turns out those come in handy for the rest of us when we’re trying to watch a video in a bustling cafe or at a noisy job site. The large text used for folks who don’t see well? That actually works great for when you browse a website on a tiny device or try to pick out text through sunlight glaring off a screen.
Google and other search engines have given us an additional reason to make our websites accessible: to improve search engine result placement. Google has taken the step of penalizing sites that are found to not be accessible. This incentivisation has actually gone a long way toward making the web more accessible.
If none of the above are enough to motivate you to make your site accessible, then perhaps the threat of a lawsuit may. Companies big and small have been successfully sued in many states for failing to make their sites accessible. The payouts in these lawsuits can be significant, even when settling for reduced amounts to avoid court proceedings.
How The Audit Works
Let’s say you manage a company website and are interested in getting a Harmonic Northwest Website Accessibilty Audit.
The process starts on our audit request page, where you give us some information about your company and website, choose some options and submit a payment. During this process, you’ll call out a few of the more important pages on the site, which we can prioritize in our audit.
When we run the audit, we’re not evaluating every single page of the site, but rather looking at a cross section of three to six representative pages. This is enough to allow us to see problematic patterns that likely appear on other pages of your site beyond the handful that we check. Three pages is our “standard” starting point, but choosing more pages allows us to get a fuller picture of potential problems on your website.
We begin our audits by running industry-standard automated tests that quickly identify technical issues on your site. This automated testing covers about 30% of the range of accessibility issues you might find on a site. Then we run through a checklist of manual tests to identify the other 70% of issues that automated tests don’t check for. The human part of the process is the most important part, catching structural and context-specific issues that robots currently aren’t so good at identifying.
Within 2-3 weeks, we’ll send you a report on our findings. Those findings will include an easy-to-digest list of issues that will need to be addressed to be fully compliant with the WCAG 2.2 AA standard. Each issue we call out will contain information on where the issue is present, how severe it is, how difficult it might be to fix and a star-based “fix value” that can help you prioritize remediation work (i.e. where is the low-hanging fruit?)
The audit is primarily geared toward informational and ecommerce websites built on common platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and the like. We are able to audit most sites, even ones that aren’t on a popular site-building platform. The audit is not particularly well-suited to sites with a high degree of custom-built interactive components that function more like web applications—to audit that kind of site you would need a custom quote.
Interested in Learning More?
You can learn more and book your audit here: