When I hear the word audit my mind instantly flashes to small conference rooms crammed with boxes of documents and financial auditors combing over numbers in complete silence. That’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

Fortunately, a communication audit is the opposite of the torture scenario above. During a comprehensive audit, evaluators review publications, videos and social media. We are ensuring graphics are relevant, the tone is positive, writing is clear and concise, and everything is easy to understand. We also try to add a little fun by creating a scavenger hunt of sorts to find commonly requested items such as the trash and recycling schedule, City Council contact information or the recreation schedule.

Without knowing what works, you’re communicating blindly. We look at what is working and what isn’t so you and your staff can be more efficient. An audit often reveals what you already know but haven’t been able to articulate for a variety of reasons. It can also give credence to your suggestions that may have fallen on deaf ears.

If you don’t have the ability to hire a third party to conduct an audit, communicators can use some of the resources below to audit your communication.

READABILITY RESOURCES

Microsoft Word Editor

The Editor in Microsoft Word will offer recommendations for clarity, conciseness and punctuation. It will also provide readability statistics such as the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. This is a quick way to doublecheck writing and make sure you are writing below a seventh-grade level.

Readable

Readable also has a text scoring tool designed to tell you how easy a piece of text is to read and provide tips for improving its readability. You can review short snippets for free or take advantage of a free 7-day trial. The Readable blog has good background information about readability formulas.

Grammerly

Grammerly also has a grammar review tool that checks for grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. You can create a free account that offers some basic writing suggestions and tone detection.

Juicy Studio

Juicy Studio utilizes Gunning Fog, Flesh Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid algorithms to grade the reading ease of the entire site

WEBSITE RESOURCES

Mystery shopping

Quiz your front office co-workers and determine the most asked questions such as where to pay a traffic ticket or how to set up water service. Find some friends from different backgrounds who aren’t familiar with your website, or local government, and look over their shoulder as they try to find those items. See what roadblocks they encounter or government jargon they don’t understand.

Alt Tag Checker

Clarity Media will quickly analyze web pages and report missing attributes on your images such as width, height or alt attributes so you can correct accordingly.

404 Page

Be sure your website has a “Page Not Found” with helpful text in case of a broken link. Type the following at the end of a URL: /notfound.html

You don’t want to be nominated for the Error Wall of Shame.

Adobe Color Accessibility Tools

Enter your existing background and text colors in the Adobe Color contrast analyzer to ensure your minimum color contrast ratios meets Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) guidelines.

Adobe Acrobat has Accessibility Tools

Adobe Acrobat Pro provides an automated way to check for many of the characteristics of accessible PDFs. You can choose which accessibility problems to look for and how you want the results reported.

Google Lighthouse Performance Scores

Google Lighthouse is a free tool that audits pages for performance, accessibility and best practices. Using Google Chrome, navigate to the website, right click and choose Inspect. A split screen will pop up. Along the top navigation is an option for Lighthouse. From there, you can generate a report that analyzes parameters such as page load, performance, accessibility and best practices.

Web.dev

This video gives tips on how to conduct your own high level accessibility review of your web pages.

WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

While human evaluation for accessibility issues is best, WAVE evaluation tools help to make web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities by identifying accessibility issues and WCAG errors.