Someone has listened to the site

Automated checks find roughly a third of accessibility problems, and this is the other two thirds. Alt text can be present and wrong. A heading structure can be valid and meaningless. A form can be labelled correctly and still announce nothing when it rejects what you typed. A screen reader is the only way to hear what the page actually says, in the order it says it.

You do not need to be an expert, and you do not need to be fast at it. Fifteen minutes with the screen reader already on your machine will find more than any scanner will.

A notice rather than a warning because it asks for real time and a little courage, not because it matters less — it matters more than most of the pack.

Source: WebAIM: testing with screen readers.

Use what you already have: VoiceOver on a Mac (⌘ + F5) or an iPhone, Narrator on Windows (⊞ + Ctrl + Enter), or NVDA, which is free. Close your eyes or turn the monitor off, and on the home page and one important page:

- listen to the page title and the first thing it says — does it tell you where you are? - move by heading and see whether the outline describes the page; - pull up the list of links and see whether they make sense out of context ("read more" six times is the thing to fix); - go through a form and listen to what each field is called and what happens when you get one wrong; - listen to an image and ask whether you learned anything from it.

Tick this when someone has done that and written down what they heard.