How a web accessibility audit works

A Straightforward Process with Clear Deliverables

Before we talk about the audit process itself, it's worth starting with what the process is ultimately working toward — because that context shapes everything that follows.

An accessibility statement is the most visible and consequential outcome of any serious accessibility engagement. It's a public declaration that your organization has taken deliberate, documented steps to evaluate and improve the accessibility of your website. Done well, it communicates to users with disabilities that their experience matters, identifies the standard you're working toward, and provides a genuine channel for users to report barriers they encounter.

You may have already come across tools that will generate an accessibility statement — or a privacy policy — automatically, in minutes, with no audit required. Those tools exist, and some organizations use them. But a generated statement that isn't grounded in an actual evaluation of your site is, at best, a placeholder. At worst, it's a liability — a public document making claims about your site's accessibility that haven't been verified and may not be accurate.

The accessibility statement we help you draft at the conclusion of every audit engagement is different. It reflects what was actually tested, what was found, what has been addressed, and what remains in progress. It's accurate, specific to your organization, and defensible — because it's backed by documented professional evaluation rather than a form submission.

That's what the process described on this page is designed to produce. Here's how it works.

Discovery and Scoping

Every audit begins with understanding your site. Before any testing starts, we identify the pages that will give us the most complete and representative picture of your site's accessibility. On smaller sites, that typically means every page. On larger sites, we work from a structured sample — generally around 25% of total pages — selected to reflect the full range of content types, functionality, and user interactions present across your site.

Template-based websites tend to repeat the same patterns across many pages, so auditing every page individually isn't always the most meaningful use of your resources. What matters is ensuring that every significant content type and functional pattern is represented in the sample. At minimum, that includes your primary entry points, standard content pages, forms, calls to action, navigation patterns, and any pages with unique functionality such as calendars, maps, embedded media, or document libraries.

The Audit

Once scoping is complete, the audit proceeds in two complementary phases that together produce a far more complete picture than either could alone.

The first phase uses a carefully selected suite of professional-grade testing instruments — each chosen for what it does best. Our toolkit includes tools that excel at different aspects of automated analysis: browser-based inspection tools that annotate and categorize accessibility issues directly on the rendered page, letting us see problems where they actually appear; scored assessments tied directly to specific WCAG success criteria; site-wide crawling that identifies structural and technical issues across your entire domain at scale; and deep-analysis engines used by enterprise accessibility programs industry-wide. Used together, these instruments provide overlapping coverage that reduces the likelihood of significant issues going undetected.

It's worth being direct about what automated testing can and cannot do. Even the most sophisticated tools can only surface an estimated 30–40% of potential WCAG conformance issues. Automation is an essential starting point — but it is only a starting point.

The second phase is where experienced human judgment takes over. Our manual evaluation covers the aspects of accessibility that no automated tool can reliably assess: how your site behaves when navigated entirely by keyboard; whether focus position is always clearly visible; how content is actually experienced by someone using a screen reader; whether your heading structure conveys genuine meaning or merely visual style; how links, buttons, and form fields are identified and announced; whether images carry appropriate and meaningful alternative text; and how color contrast holds up in real-world conditions, including text over images or gradient backgrounds.

Together, these two phases constitute a thorough, professional audit grounded in WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the current standard for web accessibility compliance.

Deliverables and What Comes Next

When testing is complete, you receive a written audit report tailored to the level of engagement you've selected. Every report includes an executive summary written in plain language, a prioritized list of issues organized by severity, the specific WCAG success criterion each issue relates to, a description of who is affected and how, and remediation guidance appropriate to your audit tier. Where relevant, we also include platform-specific notes for your content management system.

Remediation — actually fixing the issues identified — is a separate engagement, and the right path depends on your platform and your team. Our role in the audit is to identify every issue with precision and provide clear, actionable guidance. For clients whose sites are built on the platforms we specialize in, we're well-positioned to assist with implementation directly, drawing on a tested library of solutions developed specifically for those environments. For sites built on other platforms, we provide your developer with everything they need to implement fixes effectively — detailed issue descriptions, WCAG references, and remediation guidance written to be acted on, not decoded.

Either way, we remain available to answer questions and review fixes as they're implemented.

The Accessibility Statement

As noted at the outset, every audit engagement includes help drafting a tailored accessibility statement for your organization — one that accurately reflects your site's evaluated conformance status, the standard you're working toward, known limitations, the evaluation date, and a clear channel for users to report accessibility barriers.

That last element carries particular legal weight. Courts and regulators have consistently looked more favorably on organizations that demonstrate a genuine, ongoing commitment to accessibility — including a documented process for receiving and responding to user feedback — than on those who treat compliance as a one-time event.

For government entities subject to the DOJ's 2024 Title II final rule, a publicly posted accessibility statement is increasingly a specific requirement. For businesses and nonprofits, it represents a low-cost, high-value step that strengthens your legal posture and builds user trust.

We recommend revisiting and updating your statement annually alongside your accessibility review — because accessibility is not a destination. It's an ongoing commitment, and your statement should reflect that honestly.