Top automotive companies failing at web accessibility

Why test automotive websites for accessibility compliance?

In July of 2018, one of my automotive clients requested an analysis of their competitors’ website accessibility. With this request, my client demonstrated an understanding that users can have a variety of disabilities that would prevent them from using a website with a mouse pointing device, but would not prevent them from reviewing, selecting, or purchasing a vehicle online, or even driving a vehicle. A full 16% of the US population has a disability, and would benefit from keyboard and screen reader navigation features on a website. This is a significant population of about 35 million people.

According to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind,

“Accessibility is the ability for everyone, regardless of disability or special needs, to access, use and benefit from everything within their environment. It is the “degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible.”

How I tested the top automotive websites for accessibility compliance

The best way to assess a website’s accessibility compliance is to perform a full accessibility audit. This involves manual and automated tests of all representative pages (a set of pages that includes all templates used on the site and all components). An additional subset of pages should be tested as a sanity check and also to test for accessibility issues within authored content that may differ between components. A full accessibility audit can take 2 weeks or more to perform, so to save time, I didn’t do it that way.

I have learned that it’s possible to predict the probable accessibility compliance of websites more quickly by performing a more limited set of manual and automated tests only to critical pages. My analysis used a quick measurement methodology outlined below. I only performed tests on the website homepages (desktop breakpoint) in order to glean indicators of probable accessibility compliance levels.

90% of scoring: Manual accessibility testing including keyboard and screen reader testing of the top 10 most common accessibility issues (listed below). I weighted these tests at 90% because these are the strongest indicators of overall web accessibility compliance.

10% of scoring: Automated accessibility test scores and other external and internal accessibility acknowledgements, like having an accessibility policy available online, or having an internal job position for an accessibility lead within the organization (publicly searchable on the careers site or LinkedIn).

Here are the manual tests I used. These represent the top 10 accessibility issues I generally find on all websites:

1. Keyboard accessibility — Does the global navigation menu work with the keyboard/screen reader alone?
2. Heading structure employed — Are headings are marked up as headings and in a hierarchy?
3. Descriptive link labels employed — Do link labels provide enough context when heard read aloud? E.g. “Learn more” does not pass this test.
4. Accessible forms and error validation — Are form error messages are read aloud? I tested this with the zip code dealer locator field.
5. Alt attribute usage — Ensure alt attributes are always used and have appropriate content.
6. No animations that cannot be paused.
7. Scalability on mobile device — User can pinch to zoom.
8. Visible focus indicator employed.
9. Skip navigation link employed.
10. Use of landmarks — For screen reader navigation.

Summary of the results

• My results illustrate that automotive companies have an opportunity to improve the accessibility of their websites. While all companies tested ensured that the mobile version of their website is scalable through pinching and zooming, most other accessibility features were not implemented.
• The exception is Ford Motor Company. Ford’s website had the highest number of indicators of accessibility compliance in the test set, employing many basic accessibility features such as a relatively good use of headings, descriptive link labels, the most keyboard-accessible global navigation flyout menu in the set, a lack of automatic animations, and a visible keyboard focus indicator.
• No website in the test set scored well on form accessibility.
• Out of a test set of 10 automotive companies, only three of them passed for the presence of accessibility indicators. This is a dismal result.
• My client ranked 6 out of 10 within the test set for indicators of accessibility compliance. Accessibility features noted on the their website homepage included a strong visible keyboard focus indicator, moderately descriptive link labels, moderate use of descriptive headings, and some keyboard navigation ability within the global navigation flyout menu. They also gained 10 points because their homepage does not employ automated animations, although this issue is present on some of their other pages.
• To increase the number of indicators to accessibility compliance, I advised them to add a skip navigation menu, ensure their zip code form error messaging is functional, and improve keyboard functionality on the global navigation menu.

Challenge your client to invest in some of these easy to implement accessibility compliance indicators today! Let me know if there are other indicators that you like to use. Let’s work together to make all content accessible.