October 2025

IDB Website Audit Report Performance, Accessibility, Content EvaluationAuthor: Shirley SosaDate: 08/10/2025 Overview This report presents a comprehensive audit of the IDB website, aimed at assessing its current usability, accessibility, and performance. The analysis seeks to identify content, design, and structural opportunities to enhance the user experience and ensure alignment with the IDB’s corporate communication and branding standards. The audit follows a user-centered and data-driven approach, combining heuristic evaluation, accessibility testing, and web analytics to identify usability issues and content inconsistencies. Based on the findings, an effort–impact prioritization matrix was developed to outline actionable recommendations that support continuous improvement of the IDB web ecosystem, reinforcing both institutional coherence and audience engagement. Design Process The design process began with an empathy and current-state analysis to understand user needs and navigation behaviors, followed by the identification of key usability and accessibility findings through heuristic evaluation. Based on these insights, an effort–impact prioritization matrix was developed to define actionable recommendations for improving performance, content structure, and alignment with the IDB’s corporate communication and branding standards. 1. Empathy Analysis Identify user needs and improve usability, accessibility, and website performance. 2. Findings & Insights Summarize usability issues, content inconsistencies, and performance opportunities. 3. Recommendations & Prioritization Propose actionable improvements using an effort-impact matrix to guide implementation. 1. Empathy Analysis Identify user needs and improve usability, accessibility, and website performance. Market research To understand the end-user’s context, the ‘Digital 2024’ report from We Are Social was analyzed. This research provides context on the digital behavior, mobile dominance, and connectivity reality of the target audience in the region. The Audience’s Main Channel is Mobile, Not Desktop. 96.5% of users access the web through a mobile device. This makes mobile the dominant—and for many, the only—digital communication channel. Slow Connectivity Acts as a Filter of Exclusion. Average connection speeds in key Latin American markets are significantly lower than in other regions, creating a very different “connectivity reality” for users. There is a Risk of Internal “Connectivity Bias”. The website experience is often tested from offices with high-speed, fixed internet connections. This does not represent the reality for most external users.*Source: We are Social Report 2024 Performance Evaluation This performance evaluation measures the technical efficiency and user experience of the IDB website. The analysis focuses on loading speed and Core Web Vitals to identify optimization opportunities and ensure an inclusive experience. *Source: Google PageSpeed Insights Tool | Detailed Mobile Performance Analysis | Detailed Desktop Performance Analysis Performance Analysis: Key Findings 1. The mobile experience is critically slow and fails essential loading metrics. The website fails the Core Web Vitals assessment on mobile devices. The main content (LCP) takes 15.6 seconds to load on mobile, which is 6.5 times slower than the 2.4 seconds on desktop. The First Contentful Paint (FCP) on mobile is 5.8 seconds, meaning users see a blank page for too long. The overall mobile performance score is 47 out of 100. 2. The main cause of the poor performance is the page’s excessive size, especially due to unoptimized images. The total page size on the desktop test was 4,865 KiB, which is considered an “enormous network payload”. PageSpeed Insights estimates that optimizing images could save up to 2,778 KiB on desktop and 1,044 KiB on mobile. Reducing unused JavaScript could save an additional 441 KiB on both versions. The overall mobile performance score is 47 out of 100. 3. Basic accessibility and SEO errors affect inclusion and visibility. The report finds that “Image elements do not have [alt] attributes,” which makes content inaccessible to screen reader users. The document “does not have a meta description,” which affects how the page appears in Google search results. The audit also found “Links do not have descriptive text,” which creates confusion for users and search engines. Although the automated Accessibility score is high at 95 , the report warns that manual testing is encouraged to find all issues. Accessibility Evaluation This evaluation measures the IDB website’s compliance with accessibility standards to ensure an inclusive experience. The analysis combines automated and specialized tools to identify barriers that affect users with disabilities. *Source: WAVE Accesibility Tool Accessibility Analysis: Key Findings 1. 5 critical errors were found that create direct barriers to content. These 5 errors represent serious accessibility issues that fail to meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). They can prevent users with disabilities, such as those who use screen readers, from accessing information on the site. 2. 126 contrast errors make the content difficult to read for many users. This high number of contrast errors indicates a systemic issue with the website’s color palette, where text is not clearly visible against its background. This impacts not only users with visual impairments but anyone reading the site in bright light, weakening the clarity of the Bank’s communication. 3. Automated tools provide an incomplete view of accessibility. The PageSpeed Insights report showed a high accessibility score of 95. However, the specialized WAVE tool identified 5 critical errors and 126 contrast errors that the initial report did not capture. This shows the need for a more in-depth accessibility analysis. User Experience (UX) and Usability Analysis A heuristic evaluation was conducted to identify usability and design issues that affect the user experience on the IDB site. The goal of this analysis is to find opportunities to make the web more intuitive and align it with the institution’s corporate communication standards. *Source: Author User Experience (UX) and Usability Analysis: Key Findings The site consistently uses breadcrumbs (e.g., Home > Projects > Detail) at the top of internal pages, always showing the user’s current location. This provides clear orientation, reduces the feeling of being lost, and allows for easy navigation to higher-level pages with a single click, giving the user more control and confidence. The content’s terminology is rated as “difficult.” This creates a comprehension barrier for a diverse audience that is not limited to specialists, such as students and journalists. Symbols and images are used without a logical connection to the text (e.g., a “star”