Why mapping user journeys is essential to a meaningful audit.

The problem with page-by-page audits

Real users do not consume pages in isolation, or a complete website at once. They pursue tasks: signing up, buying, finding information, contacting support. A page can pass every criterion in isolation while the journey across pages still fails.

What a journey captures

A journey is an ordered set of phases, touchpoints, and associated audits, or audit samples, plus the auditor's notes on transitions:

Aquisition phase: Videos, Ads, Specific Landing Pages, Marketing Emails.
Product discovery phase: Product pages, downloadable PDF, video of demos.
Service phase: Reclamation, Client Area, Support forms, Call Centers, Documentations, FAQ.
Notification phase: E-mails, SMS, call Center.
Leaving phase: Data access, data suppression, etc.

How journeys reveal accessibility gaps

Examples of failures only visible at the journey level:

After form submission, focus drops to the top of the next page rather than landing on a confirmation message. Screen reader users do not know the action succeeded.
An e-commerce flow loses the user's cart state if they navigate to a help page and back. Users with cognitive disabilities and users of assistive tech relying on consistent state are disproportionately affected.
Multi-step authentication redirects through pages that have inconsistent skip-link behavior, breaking keyboard users' ability to navigate efficiently.
Your marketing e-mails lead to a landing page that wasn't in the first website audit samples.

None of these surface in single-page testing, and sometimes not in a complete website audit.

When to map a journey

The service has identifiable user goals (signup, purchase, search-to-find, request-to-resolution).
Users move across multiple pages or touchpoints to complete a task.
The audit's commissioner cares about real-world usability, not only conformance bookkeeping.

For a single-page service or a static brochure site, journey mapping adds little.

How many journeys

For a typical service: 2 to 5 core journeys. More than 5 usually means the journeys are too granular or the scope is too large.

Complexe journeys

For multiple journeys using similar phases, map these similar phases, and import them into your other journeys.

Documenting journeys

Each journey records:

The user goal (name and description of the journey)
The ordered samples (phases + touchpoints)
The expected outcome (last phase)

Findings tied to a journey appear in the report's journey section (CheckFox default report includes that section), not only in per-criterion lists.

Journeys also have their own public pages for sharing your accessibility coverage.