Accessibility Audit
A structured evaluation of a product against WCAG, producing a list of failures with severity, location and a route to fixing each one.
An accessibility audit tests a product against WCAG success criteria and returns findings that can be assigned and closed: what failed, which criterion, where, how severe, and what fixing it involves. It is the input to a remediation plan, not a compliance certificate — and increasingly it is a commercial document, because enterprise procurement and the European Accessibility Act both ask for evidence rather than assurances.
Automated scanners find roughly a third of issues: missing alt attributes, contrast failures, absent form labels. They cannot tell you whether alt text is meaningful, whether focus order matches the visual order, whether a custom component announces its state, or whether a keyboard user can complete the flow. That part requires manual testing with a keyboard and with screen readers, and it is where the issues that actually block people live.
Audit early, not at launch
Findings against a shipped product are expensive because the fixes are structural — focus management, semantics, component APIs. The same audit run on a component library costs a fraction, because each fix propagates.
In practice
A healthcare portal passed an automated scan with three minor contrast issues. Manual keyboard testing found the appointment-booking calendar unreachable without a mouse — the entire primary task. No scanner reports that, because the markup was technically valid.
Where teams get it wrong
- Treating an automated scan as an audit. It covers roughly a third of the criteria.
- Auditing at launch, when every finding is a structural change.
- A findings list with no severity or ownership, which never becomes a plan.
- Fixing pages instead of components, so the same issue returns on the next screen.
- No retest after remediation, so nobody knows what was actually fixed.
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Related terms
All terms- WCAGThe Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — the standard almost every accessibility law and procurement contract points at.
- Screen Reader TestingOperating a product with a screen reader to find what assistive technology actually announces — the half of accessibility no automated scanner reaches.
- European Accessibility ActThe EU directive that made digital accessibility a legal requirement for products and services sold to European consumers.
- VPATThe Voluntary Product Accessibility Template — the document enterprise procurement asks for before a deal closes.