Check your site in 15 minutes

You now have the 10 checks. This lesson puts them together into a 15 minute routine you can run on your own site, and on anyone else's, and then tells you what to do with what you find.

The routine

1. Keyboard, 3 minutes

Open your home page and put the mouse down. Press Tab and keep pressing. A box or outline should move from link to link, and you should always be able to see where it is. Does it reach every link and button? Does the menu open? If a popup appears, does Esc close it? If the outline is invisible, that is a theme setting your web person can fix in one line.

2. Zoom, 2 minutes

Hold Ctrl and press + until the browser says 200 per cent. Nothing should be cut off and you should never have to scroll sideways. Then the phone test from lesson 1. If pinching does not zoom, your site is blocking it, and your web person needs to remove one line from the page settings.

3. Pictures off, 2 minutes

Run WAVE and read the alt text it shows next to every image. Does the page still make sense with only those words? This is where the flyer with no words typed out shows up.

4. WAVE on 3 pages, 5 minutes

Home page, your busiest page, and a page with a form. Red icons are errors. Fix those first. They will almost all be missing alt text, empty links, low contrast and missing form labels, which you now know how to fix. Leave the yellow alerts for another day.

5. Phone, 2 minutes

Open the site on your phone. Read one whole page. Tap every link on it with your thumb. Open the form.

6. Tired parent, 1 minute

Pretend it is 11pm and you have had a bad day. Can you find how to contact this organisation in 10 seconds?

What to do with what you find

Sort it into 3 piles.

• Fix today in the editor. Alt text, headings, link text, flyer words typed out, grey text made darker. This is most of it.
• Fix in settings. Autoplay off, font size up, brand colour swapped for a darker shade, new tab links turned off.
• Send to your web person. Invisible focus outline, zoom blocked, a custom form with no labels, a menu the keyboard cannot open.

For the third pile, send them the WAVE results and the guideline number from the end of each lesson. "WAVE shows 6 empty links on the home page, that is WCAG 2.4.4" gets a faster answer than "the site is not accessible". The official list, How to meet WCAG 2.2 (opens in a new tab), is the one to point them at if there is any argument.

Say what you have done

Add a short accessibility page to your site. If you are a public body you have to publish an accessibility statement in a set format, and GOV.UK has a sample accessibility statement (opens in a new tab) to copy. If you are not, a plain page will do. Say what you have checked, what you know is still wrong, and an email address for anyone who gets stuck. People forgive a lot when you tell them.

Keep it that way

Before anything goes on the site, run the short list.

• Headings in order.
• Links say where they go.
• Alt text on every picture.
• Flyer words typed out.
• Captions checked.

That is 2 minutes a post, and it is the difference between a site that disables people and one that does not.

In the guidelines: 2.1.1 Keyboard (opens in a new tab) (A), 2.4.7 Focus visible (opens in a new tab) (AA), 1.4.10 Reflow (opens in a new tab) (AA).