Accessibility audits & testing

What an audit actually covers

An accessibility audit is not a scanner report with a logo on it. Automated tooling reliably detects only a minority of WCAG failures — the ones expressible as a rule about markup. Everything that depends on judgement, sequence or meaning has to be tested by a person. So every audit we deliver has four layers, and you can see which layer found which issue.

1. Automated coverage

We crawl every distinct template and run rule-based testing (axe-core and equivalents) across the full page set, in multiple viewport widths and in both light and dark rendering. This gives breadth: it tells us which of your 4,000 product pages share the same three defects.

2. Manual expert review

A specialist works through all 56 Level A and AA success criteria of WCAG 2.2 on each unique template and interaction, keyboard only, inspecting the accessibility tree as they go. This is where focus order, name/role/value, error handling, reflow and the 2.2 additions — focus not obscured, target size, dragging alternatives, consistent help, redundant entry, accessible authentication — are actually decided.

3. Assistive-technology testing

Every critical flow is driven end to end with real assistive technology, because “technically conformant” and “usable” are not the same finding:

• NVDA and JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, TalkBack on Android
• Keyboard-only operation and switch-style sequential access
• Screen magnification at 400%, and browser zoom to 200% text
• Voice control (Dragon, Voice Control) for label-name mismatches
• Windows High Contrast / forced-colours mode

4. Usability review with disabled users

Optional, and worth it for anything transactional. Moderated sessions with screen-reader users, low-vision users and users with motor or cognitive disabilities surface the barriers that pass every criterion and still lose you the sale.

What you receive

Prioritised issue register

Every finding with its WCAG 2.2 criterion and level, the exact location, a screenshot or recording, the user impact, a severity and litigation-risk rating, and a concrete code-level recommendation — delivered as a spreadsheet and, if you prefer, as tickets in your own tracker.

Executive summary

Three pages your leadership will actually read: where you stand, what the realistic exposure is, what it takes to close it, and in what order.

Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT 2.5)

The document procurement teams, public-sector buyers and opposing counsel ask for. Completed honestly — “partially supports” with an explanation beats an unearned “supports” that a tester can disprove in ten minutes.

Remediation roadmap

Findings grouped into work packages with effort estimates, sequenced so that the barriers a plaintiff screens for come down first.

Findings walkthrough

A working session with your developers and designers — screen sharing, real assistive technology, questions answered. Teams fix things faster after they have heard their own product read aloud.

Scope and timing

Typical audit scopes. Final scope is quoted after a short discovery call.

Scope	Typical site	Coverage	Elapsed time
Risk screen	Brochure site, single flow	Automated across all pages, manual review of up to 8 templates	3–5 business days
Standard audit	Marketing site plus one transactional flow	All layers, up to 20 unique templates, 2 assistive technologies	2–3 weeks
Platform audit	E-commerce, SaaS, portal	All layers, unlimited templates, 4+ assistive technologies, native apps on request	4–6 weeks
Document audit	PDFs, forms, reports	PDF/UA and WCAG review, tagging assessment	Priced per document

Audits that hold up under scrutiny

If your audit is ever going to be read by opposing counsel, it needs to be defensible. Ours record the test date, the browser and assistive-technology versions used, the criterion applied and the evidence for each conclusion — the same discipline an expert report requires. When a matter is already active, the audit is scoped by our attorneys from the start so that the work product is useful in the proceeding rather than merely interesting.