RE: Seeking Automated WCAG Testing Tool with Quick Client Report Sharing

Just to be clear about the valuelessness of any automated accessibility
test report, it has long been known that:

1) Automated WCAG testing tools can only find about one third of the likely
or possible WCAG non-compliances. Computers are simply not clever enough to
detect the majority of likely defects.
2) Automated WCAG testing tools cannot detect many of the most important
accessibility defects. They only find the less important ones.

Given them, why would you want to share any such report with clients? You
simply leave those clients with most of the accessibility problems they
already have. (And, if in the US or other places where lawsuits are rife,
it leaves them just as open to being sued as they were before the report!)

The only reasons I can see for sending such a report to anyone would be a)
when pitching for new audit business, it provides something to show a
potential client to say, here is a quick report of some of your issues, now
let us help you. Or b) as Steve says, so you can clear all automatically
reportable issues (whether real or not) just to avoid attracting the
attention of legal testers.

Just to backup and emphasise items (1) and (2) above, consider some of the
highly important things the auto tools cannot find:

1) Having images described correctly to them is very important for blind
people, especially if a website has lots or they have important text in
them. The tools can report if there is no alt attribute - but that's just
the easy bit. If an alt text just says "An image" (yes, some devs actually
do that!), or if the developer inserts the URL of the file, or other
meaningless developer info (some do that as well), or they just give a poor
description, the auto tools cannot tell you those alt texts are meaningless
and fail the WCAG.

2) Keyboard users must be able to operate every link and button. But on
many websites that's impossible. Very often the buttons in the main
navigation menu don't work from the keyboard - that denies the whole of the
rest of the website to keyboard users. But the automated tools cannot find
most of the issues that cause that.

3) When headings aren't marked up as headings, that's one of the most
important things of all to blind people. Otherwise screen readers cannot
identify them as headings, and the whole page becomes just one mass of text
to them. They can only look through every bit in turn to find out what it
is about. But the automated tools do not detect that.

The list goes on and on. That is why I think reports from automated tools
are largely valueless, finding only the more minor things that are easy to
detect with software. Don't send the report to anyone until at least, as
Steve says, you have done a manual audit first and the developers have
fixed all the main defects.