Accessibility audit tools
This page contains web accessibility testing tools developed by the Design & Development team at the CFPB. They help us check for our desired level of conformance to federal regulations around accessibility. More plainly speaking, they help ensure we provide an inclusive web experience for all of our users.
CFPB manual web accessibility audit
Developed for use by both designers and developers, our manual web accessibility audit tool is largely comprised of tests for conformance to WCAG 2.0 AA success criteria. The audit, which is written in Excel, includes coverage for automated testing, screen reader testing, mobile testing, keyboard testing, plus additional tests for sensory sensitivity and forms.
The audit is written for use on a MacBook installed with both Microsoft Excel and the Chrome browser, as well as an iPhone.
Download the CFPB manual accessibility audit
If you have any feedback, please let us know by filing a issue.
Lighthouse automated audit
We also monitor our pages for accessibility issues by running Lighthouse, a free, automated testing tool, on a nighty basis against a set of our web pages.
View the CFPB Lighthouse reports dashboard
Lighthouse accessibility reporting results are less comprehensive than those from our manual web accessibility audit, but are still valuable as a measurement of the health of the website, and to pinpoint specific issues to fix.
Guidelines
This section describes our scale for classifying the severity of an accessibility bug.
The scale
Critical
Violations that match the following criteria are considered Critical:
| WCAG Level | Usability impact | Page type or functionality |
|---|---|---|
| A or AA | 1: Cannot achieve primary purpose of page/component | Global header/footer, Top 20 single page, CMS site-wide pattern |
High priority
Violations that match the following criteria are considered High priority:
| WCAG Level | Usability impact | Page type or functionality |
|---|---|---|
| A or AA | 1: Cannot achieve primary purpose of page/component | Pages that aren’t in the top 20, or a one-off component |
| A or AA | 2: Hurts comprehension of page/component purpose | Global header/footer, Top 20 single page, CMS site-wide pattern |
Medium priority
Violations that match the following criteria are considered Medium priority:
| WCAG Level | Usability impact | Page type or functionality |
|---|---|---|
| A or AA | 2: Hurts comprehension of page/component purpose, or 3: Unrelated to main page/component purpose | Pages that aren’t in the top 20, or a one-off component |
| A or AA | 3: Unrelated to main page/component purpose | Global header/footer, top 20 page, CMS site-wide pattern |
| AAA | All other accessibility-related issues |
Definitions
Usability impact levels
1: Cannot achieve primary purpose of page/component
Example: A focus loop prevents you from tabbing all the way to the end of a form and submitting it.
2: Hurts comprehension of page/component purpose
Example: Repeated contextless “Read more” links in a table, if there is a relatively simple workaround for the user (e.g., user could cycle through all of the table cells to understand the context of links, rather than navigate through links only)
3: Unrelated to main page/component purpose
Example: Landmarks contain the word “navigation” twice because of redundant labeling
Page type or functionality
Global header/footer
Issues that fall within the megamenu or footer and are therefore on every page
Top 20 page
A single page that, based on analytics, falls within the top 20 most visited pages of your site
Site-wide pattern
Any pattern that is available as a standard component or pattern (e.g. expandables, video player)
Other
- Any page that does not fall into the Top 20 page category
- One-off component: Functionality that is not available as a standard component or pattern, or custom code
What to do with this scale
- When entering the usability impact and page/functionality type into the manual accessibility audit, the severity rating will be calculated automatically for you.
- If reporting an accessibility bug outside of the context of an audit, you can manually determine what the severity should be from the explanation above.
- Use the severity to aid in determining when to fix accessibility bugs.