User experience design audit in Westwood

These two get commissioned as one job. They are not one job. A usability review asks whether a capable, motivated person can get something done. An accessibility review asks whether the interface works for people using it in ways the designer did not picture. The findings overlap. The methods do not.

Automated tools sit at the bottom of the accessibility side. They check what a machine can check: contrast values, missing alternative text, form fields with no label, heading levels out of order. That is a real floor. Clear it. It is also a small share of what actually blocks somebody.

The rest needs a person. Whether a label describes the field or merely names it. Whether an error message says what to do next. Whether focus lands somewhere sensible after a dialogue closes. Whether a control that looks like a button behaves like one when reached from the keyboard.

Keyboard order is the single most revealing test we run, and it takes minutes. Put the mouse away. Walk the whole task with the tab key. Anything you cannot reach, or reach but cannot see, is a defect that no screenshot will ever show.

Screen reader passes come next. They are slower. The point is not to catch every announcement. It is to hear the page in the order it is actually delivered, which is rarely the order it appears on screen.

Then the findings diverge in a way that matters for the report. A usability problem costs conversions and is negotiable against other work. An accessibility failure is a barrier, and in many sectors it is also a legal exposure. Putting both in one list ranked by severity blurs that distinction. So we separate them. Each finding says plainly which it is.

There is a second divergence people trip over. A change can improve usability and reduce accessibility at the same time. Hiding secondary controls behind a menu tidies the screen and lengthens the path for anybody navigating linearly. Animation that clarifies a transition can make some users ill. These are trade-offs to decide, not oversights to fix.

Motion, colour dependence and time limits are the three we check every time, because all three look fine to the team that built them.

What we hand back is two lists with different logic. Accessibility findings carry the criterion they fail and the evidence. Usability findings carry the task they interrupt and what it appears to cost. Mixing the two produces a document that satisfies neither the designer nor the lawyer.