Barrier Walkthrough

A systematic accessibility evaluation method that guides evaluators through the process of identifying barriers that people with disabilities may encounter on a website. Unlike a standard conformance review that checks against all WCAG success criteria, a barrier walkthrough focuses on specific user groups and the barriers they face, making the evaluation more targeted and manageable. The Structured Walkthrough variant breaks each accessibility heuristic into components — the principle, affected user groups, barrier description, step-by-step testing procedure, and verification steps — providing enough scaffolding that evaluators without deep accessibility expertise can produce reasonably reliable results. Research shows this approach can bring novice evaluator reliability to within 11 percentage points of expert performance.