WCAG 2.2 Demo SuiteEvaluating a whole website
Knowing all 86 success criteria does not tell you how to audit a site. A site has thousands of pages; you will look at a dozen. Which dozen you choose decides whether your report is worth anything — and that choice is the part almost nobody teaches.
WCAG-EM is the W3C's Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology. It does not add requirements to WCAG. It tells you how to apply WCAG to a whole website in a way that is repeatable, defensible, and honest about its own limits.
Why a method is needed at all
WCAG conformance is defined per page, and it is all-or-nothing: one failed Level A criterion means that page does not conform at any level. There is no percentage and no partial credit.
So a claim about a site is always an inference from a sample. Two auditors who pick different samples reach different conclusions about the same site. WCAG-EM exists to make that sampling deliberate and reproducible instead of arbitrary.
The five steps
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Step 1 — Define the scope
What counts as "the website"? Which conformance level? Which browsers and assistive technologies? Get this wrong and everything downstream is disputed.
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Step 2 — Explore the website
Find the common pages, the essential functionality, the page types, the technologies, and anything unusual. You cannot sample what you have not seen.
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Step 3 — Select a representative sample
A structured sample plus a random sample. This is the step that determines whether your audit finds the real problems, and the step most often skipped.
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Step 4 — Audit the selected sample
Check every page in the sample against every criterion in scope. Record pass, fail or not applicable, with evidence for each.
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Step 5 — Report the findings
Document what you evaluated, how, and what you found — including your sample, so someone else can check your work.
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The sample site: Riverline Books
Eight pages of a plausible bookshop, seeded with real accessibility defects. This is what you will audit.
Worksheets and templates
Each step has a worksheet you fill in as you go. Together they become your report.
How long this takes
| Step | Effort | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scope | 30 min | A scope statement everyone has agreed |
| 2. Explore | 1–2 hours | An inventory of page types and functionality |
| 3. Sample | 30 min | A justified list of pages |
| 4. Audit | 1–2 hours per page | A defect register with evidence |
| 5. Report | 2–3 hours | The evaluation report |
The audit step dominates, and it is almost entirely manual. This is the arithmetic that makes the limits of automated testing concrete: a scanner will finish your whole sample in under a minute and leave you the other 95% of the work.