Service
Accessibility and speed audits
Public bodies, universities, heritage organisations and the firms that supply them increasingly need to show their websites are accessible and fast. We audit, explain in plain English and fix.
Who this is for
- Organisations supplying the public sector or the university, where accessibility is often a tender question.
- Attractions, venues and heritage organisations that want every visitor to be able to plan a trip.
- Shops and booking sites losing sales to slow pages and awkward checkouts.
- Rural businesses whose customers browse on weak mobile signal.
Accessibility audits
We test your key templates and journeys against WCAG 2.2 level AA, the standard most UK organisations work to. Automated tools find perhaps a third of issues, so most of the work is manual: navigating with only a keyboard, using a screen reader, zooming to 200 and 400 per cent, checking colour contrast, and testing forms with errors.
| Area | Typical issues we find |
|---|---|
| Images | Missing or unhelpful alt text; text baked into images |
| Colour | Light grey text, buttons with low contrast |
| Keyboard | Menus that cannot be opened, focus that disappears |
| Forms | Missing labels, errors only shown in red |
| Structure | Skipped heading levels, vague link text like "click here" |
| Media | Video without captions, autoplaying content |
Speed audits
Slow pages lose visitors, especially on mobile. We measure real-world performance using Core Web Vitals, look at how pages load on a throttled mobile connection, and find what is heavy: oversized images, unused scripts, render-blocking fonts, slow hosting, or third-party widgets such as chat tools and embedded maps.
What is included, step by step
- Scope. We agree which templates and journeys to test, such as home, a service page, a booking or checkout, and contact.
- Testing. Automated scans, then manual keyboard, screen reader, zoom and mobile testing.
- Report. Every issue with where it occurs, who it affects, how severe it is, and how to fix it, in plain English.
- Prioritised plan. Quick wins first, then larger fixes, with effort estimates.
- Fixes. We make them on most platforms, or brief your developer.
- Retest. We check the fixes and help you write or update your accessibility statement.
How long it takes and what drives the cost
Most audits take one to two weeks. Cost depends on the number of templates and journeys tested, complexity such as booking engines or third-party embeds, and whether you want us to make the fixes. Testing a representative set of templates is usually more useful than testing every page.
Common mistakes
- Relying on an accessibility overlay widget, which does not fix the underlying issues.
- Treating an automated score as proof of accessibility.
- Third-party booking or payment tools that were never tested.
- PDFs that cannot be read by screen readers.
- Optimising speed once and then adding new scripts every month.
Why this matters in York
York's economy leans heavily on organisations where accessibility is expected rather than optional. The University of York, the hospitals, the council and the research organisations around Heslington and Sand Hutton all buy from local suppliers, and tender questionnaires increasingly ask how a supplier's own website meets accessibility standards. A firm that can point to a recent audit and a published accessibility statement answers that question in a sentence.
Tourism adds a second reason. Visitors to an old city with steps, narrow doorways and listed buildings often need to plan carefully, and a good number of them use screen readers, magnification or keyboard navigation to do it. If your booking page cannot be used without a mouse, those visitors cannot book with you at all.
Speed matters for a third reason: many people read your site on mobile data, walking between streets in the centre or sitting in the countryside around York, where signal is patchy. A page that loads in two seconds on office broadband can take far longer there.
A worked example
A typical audit for a visitor attraction might find that the "Book tickets" button is a styled image with no text alternative, that the date picker cannot be operated by keyboard, that light grey opening-times text fails contrast checks, and that a large hero video adds several megabytes to every page. None of these are hard to fix. Replacing the image button with real text, swapping the date picker for an accessible one, darkening the text and replacing the video with a compressed still image would remove the worst barriers and make the page much faster, often within a few days of work.
What you receive
- A written report with each issue, its location, severity, who it affects and how to fix it.
- A prioritised action list split into quick wins and larger changes.
- Before and after speed measurements for the tested templates.
- A draft or updated accessibility statement.
- A short call to walk through the findings with you or your developer.
How we measure it
Before and after: the number and severity of WCAG failures on the tested templates, and Core Web Vitals scores from lab and, where there is enough traffic, real user data. You get both in the final report.
Questions
Can you fix the issues as well as find them?
Yes, on most platforms. If your site is managed by another agency we write the fixes up so they can action them.
How long does an audit take?
Typically one to two weeks depending on the size of the site.
Do accessibility overlays work?
No. They do not fix the code underneath and can make some sites harder to use. We fix the site itself.
Which standard do you test against?
WCAG 2.2 level AA, which most UK organisations use.
Will a faster site rank better?
Speed is one of many ranking factors, but a faster site reliably keeps more visitors, which is the bigger benefit.