Check your own site
in 20 minutes
Seven things you can check yourself, no tools, no developer. Ordered by what actually failed most often when we audited 253 Austrian websites.
Oleksii Kovalenko · 14 September 2026 · 7 min read
This is not a developer checklist. It is what a site owner can verify personally, in one sitting, before spending money on anyone — including us. The order is not arbitrary: it follows what actually failed when we tested 253 Austrian websites.
Before you start
The standard is WCAG 2.1 level AA — the one the Austrian Barrierefreiheitsgesetz points to. You will not "pass" or "fail" from this list. You will find out whether you have a small problem or a large one, which is the only thing you need before deciding what to do next.
Do this on the pages that matter: the home page, one content page, and — this is the one people skip — the whole path from product to confirmed order, or from form to sent. That path is where the law actually bites and where nothing gets tested.
1. Can you zoom?
Failed on 15.5% of shops · 31.3% of pharmacies
On your phone, open the site and pinch to zoom in. If nothing happens, someone disabled it — usually years ago, to stop a layout wobbling.
This is the cruellest failure on the list and the cheapest to fix: it is a single attribute in the page header, minutes of work. It also disproportionately affects exactly the people most likely to be on a pharmacy or clinic site.
2. Tab through the page
Put the mouse away. Press Tab repeatedly from the top of the page and watch.
- Can you always see where you are? If the highlight disappears, keyboard users are navigating blind. Someone removed the focus outline because it looked untidy.
- Does the order make sense? It should follow the visual reading order, not jump around.
- Can you get out of everything? Open your cookie banner, your menu, your search overlay — then try to leave using only the keyboard. If you are stuck, that is a keyboard trap, and it is a hard failure.
- Can you complete a purchase or send the form? Whole path, no mouse.
No tool finds this. It is the single most valuable thing on this page.
3. Do your icon buttons have names?
Failed on 57.8% of shops · 67.7% of hotels — the most common failure after contrast
The magnifier, the hamburger, the arrows on your gallery, the little globe that switches language, the X that closes a dialog. Visually obvious, and to a screen reader most of them announce as nothing at all — just "link".
You can check without any tools: Tab to each icon and look at your browser's status bar, or ask whoever built the site to show you the accessible name of each one. Usually one attribute per element to fix, and it converts a silent interface into a usable one.
4. Is the text readable?
Failed on 80.6% of shops — the most common failure overall
Grey text on a white background, light text over a photograph, a pale placeholder in a form field. The requirement is a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.
Do not eyeball this — your eyes are better than the standard assumes, and you already know what it says. Use any free contrast checker with the two hex values from your brand palette.
Fix it in your design tokens, not page by page. Contrast failures cluster because they come from one palette decision. We had this exact problem on our own site: a pair in our brand guidelines measured 1.81:1 against a required 4.5. Changing where one colour was allowed to appear resolved every instance at once.
5. Do your images say anything?
Failed on 25.2% of shops
Every meaningful image needs alternative text. Two mistakes are equally common: leaving it empty on a product photo, and filling it with "image1.jpg" or a keyword stuffing attempt.
The test is simple: if the image vanished, what would the person need told? For a product, the product. For a decorative flourish, nothing — and it should be marked as decorative rather than described.
6. Do your forms have real labels?
Click directly on the word "Email" above a field. If the cursor jumps into the field, the label is properly connected. If nothing happens, it is just text sitting nearby, and assistive technology cannot tell which field it belongs to.
Then submit the form wrong on purpose. Does the error say what to do? "Invalid input" in red is not an error message — it is a colour. Someone who cannot see red learns nothing from it.
7. Does anything move on its own?
Carousels, auto-playing video, parallax, marquees. Two rules: the user must be able to stop anything that moves for more than five seconds, and nothing should flash more than three times per second.
If your operating system has "reduce motion" switched on, the site should respect it. Ours does — the marquee stops.
What this does not cover
It is also not a legal assessment. Whether the Barrierefreiheitsgesetz applies to your organisation depends on your size and what you sell, and that is a question for an Austrian lawyer, not for a checklist.
If you found things
Fix in this order, because it is roughly the order of cruelty-per-hour-of-work:
- Zoom restriction — minutes
- Names on icon buttons and links — an attribute each
- Focus visibility — one CSS rule, usually
- Contrast, in the palette rather than per page
- Alt text on real images
- Form labels and error messages
- Everything a keyboard revealed — this is the real work
Items 1 through 3 are usually an afternoon and remove a surprising share of the daily friction for real users. Item 7 is the part that needs a developer and the part the law is actually about.
Want the rest of the list?
A proper audit pairs the automated pass with manual testing — keyboard, focus order, screen reader, forms — and gives you an hour estimate per fix, prioritised.