An accessibility audit is a systematic evaluation of an interface against a standard — usually WCAG 2.1 — to find, document, and prioritize barriers that keep people with disabilities from using a product. Auditing sits between knowing the guidelines and actually fixing things: it is the activity that turns an abstract success criterion like "non-text content has a text alternative" into a concrete, located, reproducible defect that someone on a team can repair.
In this course, auditing matters because it is how you check your own work. Automated checkers can flag perhaps a third of common issues, so a usable audit method combines tooling (browser extensions, DevTools panels, contrast checkers) with manual inspection (keyboard-only navigation, heading and landmark structure, focus order, form labels, meaningful alt text) and, where possible, testing with assistive technology. You will apply this to your own prototype, then decide what to fix first and how to write it up.
As you watch, pay attention to three things: the method each presenter uses to select pages and work through them in a repeatable order; the evidence they capture for each finding (location, standard violated, what the user experiences, suggested remediation); and the judgment calls about severity — which failures block a task entirely versus which degrade the experience. Notice also how the tools differ in purpose: WAVE surfaces page structure and flags for human review, DevTools digs into the accessibility tree and computed properties, and a formal audit report packages all of it for stakeholders.
Pope Tech demonstrates using the WAVE browser extension together with a small sample of pages as the launching point for a manual accessibility audit. Expect coverage of how to read WAVE's errors, alerts, contrast flags, and structure panels, and how automated flags are used as prompts for human verification rather than as a finished result.
Pope Tech is an accessibility tooling vendor with deep WAVE expertise, and the video directly models the audit-methods and page-sampling workflow you will reuse when auditing your own prototype.
Kris Rivenburgh of The ADA Book explains, at a conceptual level, what a digital accessibility audit is and how one is typically conducted for websites, apps, and other digital assets. The video is likely to cover the scope of an audit, how it relates to WCAG conformance and legal compliance expectations, and what a client or team should expect to receive as output.
It is the right starting point because it frames audits as a process and a deliverable rather than a tool, which sets up the subtopics on prioritizing findings and writing them up for an audience.
This Chrome for Developers session walks through the accessibility features built into Chrome DevTools, including inspecting the accessibility tree, reviewing computed accessible names and roles, contrast checks, and automated auditing panels. It is aimed at developers debugging specific accessibility defects in a live page.
It complements WAVE by showing how to diagnose why an element fails — essential evidence when you need to write a finding that a developer can act on — and it comes directly from the browser team that builds the tooling.
Together these videos move from definition to practice: the ADA Book overview connects auditing to WCAG and to the legal and ethical obligations behind accessible design (MO1, MO4), while the WAVE and Chrome DevTools demonstrations give you concrete techniques for inspecting a live interface and detecting barriers affecting visual, motor, and cognitive access (MO2). Because both tool videos surface not just the existence of a problem but its cause in markup and structure, they feed directly into revising your own prototype to meet standards and into writing findings that specify an actionable remediation (MO3).
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.