Website accessibility has always been an important part of website design and digital user experience. But you may be thinking “I seem to be hearing about accessibility a lot more now”, and you would be right! New accessibility directives from the EU in June 2025 have raised the bar in terms of what is expected from websites and how accessible they should be.
Accessibility EU directive 2025
In June 2025 the EU unveiled a new accessibility directive that put a greater emphasis on digital accessibility i.e. making websites and digital media more useable for people who are unable or choose not to access websites with a traditional mouse, keyboard and smartphone.
These new standards can be adhered to in a number of ways. For example, at Sprint Digital accessibility is now a key part of the design and development process, each decision we make around the look, feel and function of our client’s webpages is done with accessibility in mind. For existing websites, testing needs to be carried out to ensure that sites are meeting the EU standards, this can be done in a number of ways but can be broadly split into manual and automatic testing.
Automatic testing
Automatic testing is the process of using automated tools to test your webpages for accessible features. These testing tools focus on the code of your webpage rather than visually scanning or actually using the page. Features that these tools are good at identifying include sufficient form and link labels to provide context for page content, image alternative text to describe imagery, correct language tags, fully functional links. These tools are a great way to start your accessibility testing, but they are not a complete solution as they don’t actually use the website. This is where manual testing comes in.
Manual Testing
Manual testing is done by a person rather than testing software and requires a user’s own judgement (based on accessibility criteria) to decide whether a page is accessible or not. Below are the main types of manual testing.
Keyboard Testing
Keyboards are the most common alternative way of browsing web pages. You have probably used a keyboard yourself on occasion to jump up or down the page or to tab through a form. It’s an easy way for people who might not have the dexterity to use a mouse to still be able to interact with a website.
Keyboard accessibility testing involves navigating and using the webpage solely with a keyboard and ensuring that everything you can do with a mouse can also be achieved with a keyboard alone. This includes identifying and clicking all links, interacting with any dynamic page elements, moving up and down the page, opening and closing any popups, and accessing form inputs to name a few. Keyboard accessibility is often the first manual test done because it underpins other tests below. If your page is not keyboard accessible, then screen readers will have a difficult time accessing you page as well.
Screen Reader Testing
Screen readers allow people who may not be able to read and see a web page’s content to be able to absorb and interact with the content via audio. Once a webpage loads, the screen reader software will read out all of the page’s written content, clickable links and any image alt texts and context labels to help the user get a full understanding of the page. The user can also navigate the page using a mouse, keyboard or other input device and have the screen reader read out only the content and context for the areas of the page that the user is interacting with.
In order to test screen reader compatibility, a tester must manually test every part of the webpage to ensure that a screen reader can access it and explain the content appropriately to the user. The key with screen reader testing is to ensure that every part of the page makes sense when accessed out of context.
Zoom/Responsiveness testing
For users with impaired vision or those who have difficulty reading smaller text, the ability to zoom in is hugely important on a website. And it is equally important that a website is able to zoom in without losing functionality or layout fluidity. After all there is no point in zooming in to make text more visible if in doing so the webpage layout breaks and the text content is no longer fully visible.
Zoom and responsiveness testing is done by zooming in usually to 200-250% on your computer browser and ensuring that the page remains useable. Classic issues that come up in zoom testing would include text disappearing off the side of the page or other page elements (images, sidebars) blocking the now enlarged text.
Visual Testing
Even after the above tests have been carried out, there may be issues that slip through the cracks. Some accessibility issues can only be observed by opening the website on multiple device types, and using it as a user would.
Examples of other accessibility issues that can only be seen wit visual testing might be the presence of animations, flashing/flickering content and text not having sufficient contrast against background images (this is a colour contrast issue that is sometimes missed by automatic tools.)
The above tests should all be carried out on your website to ensure that it is accessible to everyone. If you have an existing website that is in need of an audit, or if you are in the market for an accessible website, please email us at [email protected] and we will do all we can to build your accessible web presence.
