When WAVE Lies

I recently had someone come to me frustrated that they scanned their site with WAVE and showed some issues, but this other site that looked like it had a ton of issues didn’t come back with any issues in WAVE.

And I totally understood where they were coming from.

You’re trying to make your site accessible, and you’re using these tools to help you figure out what you need to do. Even if it doesn’t catch everything, the way these tools are talked about, it makes it sound like it’ll catch whatever percentage of issues. And you’re relying on it to do that.

And now you’re seeing this scanner find issues with your site and not with others, even though they seem worse.

So what gives?

Well, it comes down to construction. The “automated testing finds whatever percent of issues” is based on the assumption that everything is coded well. It’s the maximum amount of things these scanners can find. The automated tools are finding things it can find, calculating, and comparing against what it knows.

So the page needs a base level of code quality in order to be able to find issues.

Because of the way different page builders put the code together, the issues are essentially hidden within a ton of nested divs and obscured in various ways, so the tools have trouble differentiating what to test against.

An automated tool that comes back as “no issues found” just means the tool found no issues. Results from these tools should always be verified.

“No issues found” doesn’t mean their site is more accessible than yours. It doesn’t mean they don’t have to fix their issues.

It does mean they’re going to have a harder time finding and fixing issues. If the easy-to-find stuff is hard to find, the whole site is going to be harder to fix.

What about the lawsuits?

I’m not a lawyer, but at first glance, it does seem like these sites wouldn’t get caught up in those automated mass notices that get sent to try to get people to settle.

It would essentially be the same thing as if someone used a site that was just images with terrible alt text. It wouldn’t get picked up on the automated scanners, but anyone coming to the site is going to have a real problem using the site.

The good news is that it seems like things are moving in the direction of what the laws and regulations are intended to be. To provide the same access to things for everyone, regardless of how they get there.

People who visit sites and have legitimate issues should be able to contact the site owner who has a certain amount of time to respond.

The goal would be to prevent people from having to reach out to you in the first place. Because as sites become more accessible, people are going to leave an inaccessible site for one that lets them do what they need to do.

And if it’s a site that has no alternative, it is imperative that the site works for everyone.

Now what?

It’s tempting to look at some other site and be annoyed that their site doesn’t have any issues in the WAVE scanner. But it’s actually a sign that they’re going to have a much harder time fixing their site — if they can even fix it without having to redo the whole thing.

So go ahead and scan those other sites, see what you can find, and learn what issues get flagged and which ones end up sliding through, possibly even why that happens. Use it to teach you how to dig deeper, bring back what you find, and improve your own site. And if you’re feeling generous with your time, let those people with inaccessible sites know to hopefully improve these sites for people who come to it after you.