How to audit a Confluence space for accessibility
The instinct is to open the first page and start fixing. On a space of a few thousand pages that is a year of work with no way to tell whether it is going well.
1. Decide what is in scope, and write it down
Not every space needs the same answer. Start by listing which spaces are reachable without logging in, which feed a Jira Service Management help centre, and which are published or embedded anywhere public. Those are the ones a regulator or a customer will look at. Internal-only spaces still matter for the colleagues who use them, but they are a second wave, not the first.
2. Measure the whole thing before touching anything
Scan every page and record the number. This matters for two reasons. It tells you the size of the job in hours rather than in dread, and it is the baseline that later lets you say "up from 41%" instead of "we've been working on it".
Sampling is the usual mistake. Ten pages tell you nothing about whether the problem is concentrated in one team's twelve hundred pages or spread evenly.
3. Sort by check, not by page
This is the step that turns the project from impossible to routine. Look at the findings grouped by which check failed, not by which page failed. Real spaces look like this:
- 420 images with no alt text, across 180 pages
- 96 tables with no header row, across 71 pages
- 38 instances of bold text used as a heading
- 22 low-contrast passages, almost all in pages copied from one template
That is not four hundred and twenty tasks. It is four campaigns, and the largest one is a single instruction repeated: describe the picture.
4. Fix in order of what a reader loses
- Images with no alt text. The information is simply gone. Highest cost, cheapest fix.
- Tables with no header row. Ten seconds each, and it turns a wall of values back into data.
- Bold text used as a heading. Breaks the way screen-reader users navigate a long page.
- Link text that says "click here". Easy to sweep with a search.
- Low contrast. Usually one template or one habit; fix the source and it stops recurring.
5. Route the work to whoever wrote the page
A central team cannot write alt text for four hundred screenshots it has never seen — only the author knows what the picture was meant to show. Give each owner the list for their own pages. The work is minutes per person instead of weeks for one.
6. Stop the inflow
Everything above is remediation, and remediation without a check in the authoring flow is a treadmill. Whatever you use, authors need to see the problem while they are still on the page, not in a report three months later.
7. Re-measure on a schedule and keep the dated evidence
Monthly is enough. What you want at the end is not a perfect space — nobody has one — but a chart that goes the right way and a dated report you can attach to a procurement response or hand to a reviewer.
What this does not cover
Roughly a third of WCAG criteria cannot be settled by any tool: whether reading order matches meaning, whether a description is genuinely adequate, whether a video's captions are accurate. Automating the mechanical two thirds is what makes the human review affordable, because the reviewer spends their time on the part that needs judgement.