Accessibility Evaluation

The process of assessing whether a digital product, website, or application meets accessibility standards and is usable by people with disabilities. Accessibility evaluation typically combines automated testing tools (which can check technical requirements like image alt text presence or color contrast ratios) with manual expert review (which assesses subjective criteria like whether alt text is meaningful or navigation is logical) and user testing with people with disabilities. The W3C's Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) defines a structured process including scoping, sampling representative pages, auditing against WCAG success criteria, and reporting results. For large websites, sampling strategies are critical since comprehensive manual evaluation of every page is infeasible.