Test & Evaluate Last Updated March 2026 If you manage content on an entire website, the web team can give you access to the Acquia Web Governance tool used by campus to scan and monitor quality of websites on campus. Please reach out if you would like access. Otherwise, please read below for ways to review a single page. Any errors or issues you find that you cannot address, or if you have any questions, please bring them to the attention of the Web team at cofawebmaster@austin.utexas.edu. On this page: Double Check Basics Learn from Analytics Usability Usability Testing Interaction Design Navigation & Information Architecture Readability Broken Links Responsiveness to Different Device Sizes and Browsers Accessibility Responsiveness to Assistive Technology and Customized Devices Keyboard Only Screen Reader Color and Contrast Alternate Text Page Load Time Coding Validation Security Learn More Double Check Basics the site for accuracy, correct grammar and spelling, consistent voice and tone, Double check you are following all requirements for the University, college and department, and that it follows the written style guide. Learn from Analytics If you are a website content editor you should be receiving a monthly report from Looker Studio with data analytics about your website/s, in your email inbox. If you are not, please let us know. The report will help you understand how website visitors use and engage with your site. Use it to make sure your visitors are getting what you want them to get from visiting your site and to seek improvement opportunities. Learn more on the Analytics & Visitor Data page. Usability Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design article provides common sense tips for checking the usability of the website. Such as, “Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another.” Review your web content while considering the important points in this article. Usability Testing It’s important for you to get feedback from visitors to your site. If there’s something you want people to “get” or accomplish when visiting your site, ask a friend or family member to give it a try. If you want to get a bit more formal you can perform usability tests. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can simply ask several people to try to accomplish several tasks on your site while you watch and they talk out-loud through their process. Watch this 24 minute video of Steve Krug demonstrating a usability test. Interaction Design Follow best practices from Google’s Material Design Blog. “Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design…” It includes a library of good examples of different components and website assets. Navigation and Information Architecture Navigation and information architecture are an important part of having a usable site. You may want to perform a card sorting activity to discover issues with your navigation, menus, links or labeling and to discover opportunities to improve how your visitors navigate your website. Readability The Web team provides readability reports about our websites annually. If you are working on readability you can reach out to us for a report at any time. You can also try an online website like, The Readability Test Tool which allows you to enter a URL Web address and will take the text and give a score based on the most used readability indicators. Broken Links The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is the group that writes the standards for coding websites. They provide a tool to check for broken links, https://validator.w3.org/checklink. Review Google Analytics to see where people, who end up with a Page Not Found error, came from. Responsiveness to Different Device Sizes and Browsers At the very least open the web page on your computer where you can resize the window. Also, open it up on your mobile phone. To get a little more accurate in a Web browser, like Chrome, you can open the Developer Tools (usually by right-clicking on the page and selecting “Inspect”), then click on the device icon to enable Device Mode to explore what it looks like in different devices. More advanced options include a browser emulator https://www.browserstack.com/browser-emulator. You can also use https://caniuse.com/ to see if the code used to build a website will work on different browsers. Learn more about the importance of Device responsiveness and see Responsiveness to Assistive Technology and Customized Devices below. Accessibility Wave https://wave.webaim.org/ is an online accessibility validation tool. Automated tools, such as Wave, Acquia Web Optimize and Deque, are not able to test all accessibility issues but they can tell you if basic errors, like missing alternate text, are detected. Manually testing is recommended. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides these Easy Checks. Additional testing guidance is available from WebAIM and for some specific issues, please continue reading. Assistive Technology and Customized Device Responsiveness As discussed on the page about Device responsiveness visitors use all kinds of devices but they may also configure their own system. Visitors with low vision may zoom in or increase the contrast. Dyslexic visitors may change the font. On the Mac there are numerous accessibility features that a person may enable that can alter the way your website responds. We recommend trying these out on your computer and visiting your web page. Keyboard Only We highly recommend the Test Keyboard Accessibility On Your Website quick video from the Nielsen Norman Group to get started. For a deeper dive check out Testing web experiences with your keyboard session video from Axe-con, accessibility conference. Screen Reader We recommend testing out your website with VoiceOver, the free screen reader built into the Mac. This short video, Screen Reader Basics: VoiceOver, from A11ycasts, can get you started. For a deeper dive check out the, Introduction to Screen Readers, video from a session from Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Color and Contrast The Wave https://wave.webaim.org/ site will highlight many color contrast issue. But may not be able to identify issues within images, when gradients are used or during temporary states, such as moving carousels. We highly recommend watching this short demo video from Deque University for how to Visually Inspecting Color Contrast. When you’re picking out colors to use on your website make sure that the contrast is high enough for most people. WebAIM has a color contrast checker and a link color contrast checker. Chrome Lens is a free add-on for the Chrome browser that allows you to view a webpage as a user with a visual impairment to simulate their experience of your website. Alternate Text The Wave https://wave.webaim.org/ site will highlight missing alternative text. You can also view alternate text descriptions for an image by right-clicking the image and selecting “Inspect” or “Inspect Element” to open the HTML code. Look for the “alt=” attribute in the code, which will show the alt text description for the image. Page Load Time Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights that can be informative about how well your page will load on mobile or desktop devices. Learn more about Optimization improvement opportunities. Coding Even if you do not know HTML, you can inspect the code and infer some of the meaning and even do basic troubleshooting. Understanding some basic website coding can be very helpful. To access the code in Drupal click the “Source” button, in WordPress click the “Text” tab. Code inspection is extremely helpful to troubleshoot and also to communicate design requests. More advanced code inspection can be done in the browser by viewing the source of the page. In most browsers you can find a link to View Page Source in the right-click context menu. To advance your skills we recommend Learning Chrome Web Developer Tools training on LinkedIn Learning. (You can skip the part about “setting up your environment” in the Introduction and you’ll learn all the really useful stuff by the end of section “3. Using the Elements Panel”.) Validation The W3C has a validation tool that you can run any website through and quickly see if there are validation issues with the code, https://validator.w3.org/. Security For the college sites the Web team will have already sent them to the university Information Security office for review. For other sites simply send an email to security@utexas.edu asking for an assessment. Learn More For a pretty complete list of tools from the W3C visit, https://www.w3.org/developers/tools/.The developer website, Sitepoint has an excellent article, The Ultimate Testing Checklist.
