WCAG audit services for websites and web apps

Procurement forms and legal teams ask for this work under several names, and all of it is measured against a specific version of one standard. Buying against the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in this process, and it happens before any testing starts. The version you are measured against is decided by your obligation, not by preference.

The W3C publishes an evaluation methodology for WCAG conformance, WCAG-EM. It is a Working Group Note rather than a standard, and it is the closest thing the field has to an agreed procedure. Its first step is not testing. It is three decisions, in writing: the boundary of the product, defined so that for each view it is unambiguous whether it falls inside the evaluation; the conformance level the work is measured to; and the assistive technologies and browsers the result is claimed against.

Read that as a buyer rather than as an engineer. A proposal that names neither is not quotable, not comparable against a second quote, and not defensible later when a reviewer asks what the report actually covered. You cannot score findings against a target nobody named.

So we settle both before anything is tested, and both appear on the front of the report. Ours reads like this: everything under app.example.com, tested to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver as the assistive technology baseline.

Website accessibility testing splits into two halves, and only one of them can be automated. Automated accessibility testing is useful and we run it. It clears the machine-detectable problems fast, and it belongs in your build. The trouble starts when their output is presented as a conformance verdict, which is what a same-day audit usually is.

The W3C is unusually blunt about this for a standards body: some accessibility checks cannot be automated and require manual intervention, tools cannot do it all, and in some cases tools return results that are simply inaccurate. That last part is the one vendors never quote. The problem is not only what a scanner misses, it is what a scanner reports that is not true, and someone has to know enough to overrule it.

Consider what a machine is being asked to judge. Whether alternative text describes the image or names the file. Whether focus order matches the visual order closely enough to follow. Whether an error is announced when it appears and says what to do about it. Whether a custom dropdown built from generic markup can be operated at all without a mouse. Those are questions about meaning and sequence, and no amount of parsing settles them.

Most of what we audit is not a brochure site. It is a product: a SaaS platform, a customer portal, an internal dashboard, a booking or claims workflow, an application with roles and permissions. Accessibility behaves differently there, because the interface is assembled at runtime and the barriers live in the parts a crawler never reaches.

A scanner walks pages. A product is not pages, it is states. The failures that matter sit behind a login, inside a multi-step form, in a filter that rewrites results without announcing them, in a modal that traps focus, in a data table that a screen reader reads as a wall of numbers. We test the product the way a person with a disability would actually use it, signed in and working through the flows that carry your revenue.

Accessibility testing services are quoted from scope, not from a rate card. We scope the product first, confirm which standard your obligation names, and then quote a fixed number, so you know what is included before testing begins. The price follows the number of distinct templates and flows, the platforms in scope, the conformance target, and whether remediation support and a retest are included.

A focused website accessibility audit of your key journeys is a matter of weeks once access and scope are confirmed. Larger products with multiple roles, dashboards and integrations take longer, particularly when remediation and retesting are part of the engagement. If you are working against a legal deadline, a procurement request or a launch, tell us the date and we will scope the fastest credible path to it.