Last updated December 19, 2025
This guide provides an overview of the Center for User Experience’s free digital accessibility evaluation service.
Our digital accessibility evaluations provide a high-level review of a digital tool or resource to identify barriers that may prevent users with disabilities from accessing or interacting with it. We also conduct accessibility evaluations of vendor products being considered for procurement by the university.
Self-service options
The Center for User Experience (UX) produces Make It Accessible guides to help you get started with accessibility best practices. If you’re using an enterprise tool or other common services like Canvas, WiscWeb, or Adobe Acrobat, use these guides and the accessibility checkers within those tools to ensure that you’re creating accessible content. Reach out to the Center for UX through our Digital accessibility office hours for support with accessible content creation.
Creating accessible content
Evaluating your content
Evaluating vendor tools
If you have a question about the accessibility of a third-party tool, there may be existing documentation that can help:
- The Center for UX publishes IT Usability and Accessibility KnowledgeBase articles with results from previous evaluations.
- Vendors often publish Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPAT) or Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACR) to their websites, or will provide them upon request. Consider reviewing this documentation as a starting point to help with purchasing decisions.
Submitting a request
Use the Center for UX’s Let’s Connect form to submit requests for accessibility evaluations. The only required information to submit a request is the requester’s name and email address, department or division, and request type. You can add the following information in the Additional Information field to help us get started on your request:
Product usage information
Knowing whether a tool is in use or under consideration, as well as the main user base and use cases can help us prioritize requests as they come in.
Important dates
If you need accessibility feedback by a certain date, please include that information so that we can appropriately prioritize your request or reach out with concerns. Without escalation, we may take 4-6 weeks from the time of the request to complete an evaluation.
Additional contacts
We often start our evaluations with an intake meeting to make sure that we have all of the test environment and use case information that we need. Including the contact information for everyone who should be in that meeting can help us get started on scheduling.
Intake
Once you submit a request, we will contact you to set up an intake meeting and gather additional information. During this meeting, we’ll discuss:
- Test environment and login credentials: We’ll need access to the tool or resource you would like evaluated with as much realistic data as possible. This might be the first or final draft of a new resource, a live environment of a tool or website in use, or the dev or demo environment for something in the works.
- Main tasks and use cases: We’ll discuss the highest priority and most common tasks for your users. Depending on the product and task complexity, we may ask you to provide walkthroughs or instructions to guide us in completing these user tasks.
Evaluation process
Methods
Our testing process includes automated and manual testing, guided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) success criteria. The WCAG criteria cover a wide range of best practices to make content more accessible to people with disabilities, and it is the technical standard for digital accessibility referenced by both University and federal policy.
The Center for UX is not resourced to provide end-to-end quality assurance testing during our accessibility evaluations. We find patterns of accessibility barriers and provide examples of the types of barriers found, which you can use as a guide to assess the rest of the product.
Automated testing
Automated testing allows for a quick, broad assessment of the interface, but lacks depth.
It helps us perform initial scans on web pages to assess heading structure, identify instances of missing text alternatives, and check for sufficient color contrast on the base state of text and UI elements.
Manual testing
Manual testing allows us to do deeper, in-context testing to assess the quality of the user experience.
- We test core workflows and functions with a keyboard, screen reader, and with the browser magnified up to 400%.
- We verify color contrast for images and interactive states of UI elements.
- We evaluate the quality of text alternatives for non-text content, including image descriptions and captions for video or audio.
- We may also test with a mobile device.
Documentation
We document accessibility barriers in evaluation reports and KnowledgeBase articles.
Evaluation reports
We document all of our findings in an accessibility evaluation report. Our reports include:
- The devices, browsers, and operating systems we used for our evaluation
- Pages, tasks, or components evaluated
- Summary of the level of accessibility of each task
- Descriptions and examples of specific barriers to accessibility
KnowledgeBase articles
We publish documentation of our findings in our IT Accessibility and Usability KnowledgeBase.
When possible, we strongly encourage you to publish an accessibility statement and information about our findings in your own user documentation or KnowledgeBase. Providing user documentation as close to the tool or resource as possible is the most accessible way to ensure people know how to get help.
After an evaluation
Handoff meeting
After completing our evaluation, we will schedule a handoff meeting to review and discuss the barriers we found. We’ll include the same attendees as the intake meeting, and encourage you to forward the invite to additional stakeholders, such as service owners, content managers, or developers who may have questions about the barriers or the product’s level of accessibility.
Remediation
While the Center for UX doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise to support remediating barriers, we can help you get started on roadmapping and prioritizing fixes, weighing the following characteristics:
- Severity of impact: While all barriers should be addressed, some barriers might completely block access for certain users and should be considered higher priority. Consider the severity of the impact when prioritizing fixes.
- Resources to remediate: Some barriers take more time or effort to remediate, or require major infrastructural change. Addressing those barriers may require training or further consultation. When we already have the skills to fix certain barriers, quick wins can be a great place to start.
- Available workarounds: Ultimately, an experience is only truly accessible if it’s equitable. However, if there is a workaround for particular barriers, we may prioritize working on barriers that block access and have no other options or workarounds.
We don’t always have control over remediating barriers when working with a third-party tool. We can provide a copy of the evaluation report that can be shared with vendors, and we are happy to join a meeting with the vendor to explain our testing methods and the barriers we identified. It is ultimately the responsibility of the vendor to remediate barriers or work with accessibility training and consultation firms to improve their product. If they are not open to feedback or improvement, you may have to search for another solution or vendor.
Maintenance
Accessibility is a moving target. Upgrades to systems and devices always run the risk of introducing new accessibility issues, and something that was once accessible may become inaccessible down the line. If a product or service you work with has recently undergone major upgrades or it has been more than two years since the last accessibility evaluation, please contact us in the Center for UX to request an updated evaluation.
The Center for User Experience
At the Center for User Experience, we are committed to working with you to make digital spaces more accessible, usable and inclusive for all students, faculty and staff at UW–Madison. We help the university follow its Digital Accessibility Policy by offering free evaluation and consultation services to all UW–Madison community members. For guidance on complying with digital accessibility requirements, visit Digital accessibility and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Get in touch
- Meet with us: Book an office hours chat with one of our team members to ask any questions you have.
- Start a project with us: We support accessible design and development. Fill out our Let’s Connect form to begin working with us on your project or to request an accessibility evaluation.
- Email us: Not sure if you’re ready to meet? Email us to start talking and figure out what to do next.