How to Conduct a Website Accessibility Audit
An accessibility audit is more than a scan. How to do an accessibility audit, which standards apply, what the report should contain, and what it costs to have one done properly.
To conduct an accessibility audit, you need to define the scope, identify the applicable accessibility criteria, select representative pages and user journeys, perform automated and manual testing, evaluate assistive-technology access, document findings, prioritize remediation, and retest the fixes.
A complete accessibility audit combines automated testing with expert manual evaluation because automated tools cannot identify every accessibility barrier.
Key points on accessibility audits
Automated tools catch just over half of accessibility barriers. Scanning identified 57.38% of barriers in Deque’s Automated Accessibility Coverage Report. The rest takes human judgment.
WCAG conformance does not automatically mean compliance with EN 301 549. The European standard includes requirements that a WCAG-only assessment does not cover.
26 April 2027 and 26 April 2028 are the compliance deadlines under the U.S. Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule, which uses WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Post-login areas can significantly increase the scope of an audit. Templates, user journeys, and interaction states often matter more than the number of pages alone.
Table of Contents
How Accessiway can help?
How to do an Accessibility Audit
A strong audit uses complementary methods, because no single one finds every barrier or tells you whether an experience works in practice. If you need an expert-led accessibility audit, see Accessiway's Audit & Remediation service.
Method | Particularly useful for | Important limitation |
Automated testing | Some missing labels, low contrast, structural barriers, and repeatable checks. | It can’t reliably decide whether content is meaningful, understandable, or usable in a task. |
Expert manual testing | Assessing content, components, code, and interactions against agreed criteria. | It depends on a well-defined scope, suitable environments, and specialist judgment. |
Assistive-technology testing | Keyboard navigation, focus behavior, screen-reader output, and interaction with relevant tools. | One tool or environment can’t represent every user configuration. |
Testing informed by lived experience | Identifying barriers people meet in practice and where tasks break down. | It complements standards-based evaluation, and no individual represents every access need. |
The proportions are worth knowing before you plan a program around a scanner. Automated testing identified 57.38% of accessibility barriers in Deque’s Automated Accessibility Coverage Report, measured across more than 13,000 pages and page states and nearly 300,000 findings. That’s a useful head start, and it leaves the harder half to people. We’ve covered where manual and automated testing each earn their place in more detail.
A typical audit follows five steps.
Step 1: Prepare the scope and test environments
Confirm the sample, the criteria, the browser and assistive-technology combinations, the test accounts, and the data. Anything left unresolved here turns into a caveat in the final report.
Step 2: Explore the product and run automated checks
Scanners map the territory and flag repeatable failures fast. An auditor reviews every result by hand, because tools miss barriers and flag things that aren’t barriers at all.
Step 3: Assess content, components, and journeys manually
Auditors work through the sample against each applicable criterion, covering the interaction states that automated checks never reach.
Step 4: Test keyboard and assistive-technology behavior
Run the keyboard pass, then test with the agreed screen readers. Behavior differs between tools and between platforms, so the environments you settled in Step 1 shape what this stage finds.
Step 5: Record findings so teams can act on them
Findings go into a format your delivery team can work from, which is what the next section covers.
Why conduct an accessibility audit?
An audit gives your team evidence instead of an ambition: a list of barriers, ranked, with a fix direction for each.
Fix a barrier in a shared component and you’ve improved every page that uses it.
The value runs past compliance. Semantic structure, meaningful link text, alt text, and captions are the same signals search engines read, so accessibility and organic performance move together. It also shapes how people see you. Apple has spent two decades treating accessibility as a product standard rather than a feature request, and that reputation is now part of what the brand is worth.
The people who benefit are a wider group than most teams expect. Alongside people with disabilities, an accessible journey works better for older users, for people with low digital literacy, and for anyone dealing with a situational limit: bright sunlight, a noisy train, a borrowed device, one hand free or ADHD. Designing for those conditions means designing for everyone.
When should you conduct an accessibility audit?
A baseline audit is a good starting point for any accessibility program, and it’s especially valuable before a redesign, a platform migration, a product launch, a major release, a procurement process, or a market expansion.
Prioritize an audit when you’re:
Introducing or significantly changing a high-value journey, such as checkout, login, booking, application, payment, consent, or support.
Receiving accessibility feedback from customers, employees, or support teams.
Adding a third-party service that affects an important journey.
Preparing to meet a relevant accessibility, procurement, or market requirement.
How do you prepare for an accessibility audit?
Start by agreeing what the assessment is for. You might want a baseline, a better conversion journey, support for a redesign, readiness for procurement, or a view of where you stand against applicable requirements. That purpose sets the criteria, the platforms, the journeys, and the depth of testing.
Before testing begins, identify:
The digital assets in scope, including public websites, portals, web and mobile apps, documents, media, forms, and third-party tools.
The user journeys that matter most and the teams responsible for them.
Test accounts, realistic test data, and suitable environments.
The devices and assistive technologies most relevant to your users.
Third-party touchpoints, such as payment, booking, chat, consent, and video services.
Two of these deserve attention early.
Third-party services
They can create barriers inside an otherwise accessible journey, and they’re usually the barriers you can’t fix yourself.
Post-login areas
Account management, document access, and self-service tend to live behind authentication, and including them changes the size of an audit more than anything else on the list. Settle this before anyone quotes you a price.
How is an accessibility audit scoped?
An audit’s scope covers representative templates, reusable components, priority journeys, relevant content types, and meaningful interaction states.
Reviewing a form without its validation, error, confirmation, and time-out states shows you only the part that already works. A navigation component needs assessing the way people actually use it, including with keyboard focus and relevant assistive technologies.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes a repeatable framework for this, the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM): define the scope, explore the target, select a representative sample, evaluate it, and report the findings. Auditors still tailor the approach to the product and to what the audit is for.
Scope area | What may be included |
Digital assets | Websites, portals, web and mobile apps, documents, media, and other agreed products. |
Reusable elements | Templates, navigation, forms, dialogs, search, alerts, tables, and design-system components. |
User journeys | Registration, login, search, booking, application, payment, document access, and support. |
Content and states | Text, images, charts, documents, media, errors, success messages, pop-ups, and dynamic updates. |
Environments | Agreed browser, device, operating-system, and assistive-technology combinations. |
Third parties | Embedded or vendor-provided services that affect an in-scope journey. |
What does an accessibility audit test?
An audit assesses whether an in-scope experience meets the agreed criteria and works for people with different access needs. The categories below show common areas of investigation, and they illustrate a test plan without replacing one. If you’re new to the underlying criteria, our guide to what makes a website accessible covers them at a slower pace.
Coverage area | What is tested |
Structure and content | Heading hierarchy, page titles, language, semantic structure, meaningful links, labels, text alternatives, and clear instructions. |
Visual presentation | Color contrast, non-color cues, text resizing, reflow, responsive behavior, and visible focus. |
Interaction and forms | Keyboard access, focus order, control names and states, form labels, validation, error messages, dialogs, and time limits. |
Media and documents | Captions, transcripts, audio description where relevant, accessible documents, and access to information in images or charts. |
Assistive technology | Whether controls, structure, and dynamic updates reach screen readers and other relevant tools in a useful form. |
Task completion | Whether people can complete a priority journey from start to finish, including error recovery and confirmation. |
Accessibility audit vs. automated scan vs. user testing
An automated accessibility scan, accessibility audit, and accessibility user test are different activities. A scan identifies machine-detectable issues; an audit evaluates conformance against defined criteria; user testing examines how people actually experience and complete tasks.
Activity | Main question | Primary outcome |
Automated scan | What machine-detectable barriers can this tool flag? | Tool results that need human review, context, and prioritization. |
Accessibility audit | Does the agreed scope meet defined accessibility criteria? | Evidence-based findings, relevant criteria, priorities, and remediation guidance. |
User testing | Can people complete real tasks, and where do they meet barriers? | Observations about task completion, usability, and barriers experienced in practice. |
An automated scan is a useful input to an audit. User testing adds experiential insight that standards-based evaluation can’t produce on its own, and it belongs alongside that evaluation.
Which standards and legal requirements are relevant?
The standard used for an accessibility audit depends on the product, market, and purpose of the audit. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is a common technical benchmark for websites, while EN 301 549 and applicable legislation may introduce additional requirements.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is the international technical standard. It organizes around four principles, known as POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Success criteria sit at levels A, AA, and AAA, with AA the working benchmark for most organizations. WCAG 2.2 is the current version and stays backward compatible with 2.1.
EN 301 549 is the European standard for accessibility requirements in information and communication technology (ICT) products and services. It draws heavily on WCAG and includes requirements beyond a WCAG-only assessment, so WCAG conformance shouldn’t be presented as automatically equivalent to meeting every relevant EN 301 549 requirement.
The EAA is EU legislation, and it isn’t a technical test checklist. The obligations that apply and the technical routes available depend on the product, the service, the market, and national implementation.
Context | Practical audit implication |
International digital products | Agree the WCAG version and conformance level that fit your objectives, your users, and your context. |
EU products or services in scope | Consider relevant EAA obligations, national implementation, and the applicable EN 301 549 context alongside WCAG. |
US state and local government entities | The Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule uses WCAG 2.1 Level AA for covered web content and mobile apps. As of 27 August 2026, deadlines are 26 April 2027 for entities with a total population of 50,000 or more, and 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. |
Other markets and sectors | Confirm the relevant legal and technical framework with qualified local advice where needed. |
Note: This article provides general information, not legal advice. Requirements depend on the organization, the offering, the jurisdiction, and the circumstances.
What should an accessibility audit report include?
It should help decision-makers see the overall picture and help delivery teams act on specific barriers.
Each finding should include:
The barrier and the affected page, screen, component, or journey.
The relevant criterion and reproducible evidence or context.
The likely user impact and the priority assigned to it.
Practical remediation direction a developer can act on.
An executive summary should pull out the material themes, risks, and next steps. Prioritization weighs user impact against journey criticality: a blocking barrier in ecommerce checkout or account access may need urgent attention even when it appears on a single screen, while a component-level barrier can affect an entire product.
What happens after the accessibility audit?
The report starts the improvement cycle. Three things follow.
Fix at source
Agree on owners and priorities, then work through the barriers that stop people completing important journeys. Where a barrier comes from a shared template, component, or design-system pattern, fixing it there improves several experiences at once.
Validate every change
Re-test each fix in the environment and journey where it was found. That confirms the barrier is resolved and that the change hasn’t introduced a new focus, announcement, layout, or interaction barrier.
Close the gap between audits
A formal audit is a snapshot. Between them, build accessibility into everyday work:
Design reviews
Developer guidance
Quality-assurance checks
Ongoing monitoring
Accessible publishing practices
Our guide to making a website accessible, from audit to fixes covers that side in more depth.
How Accessiway can help
An audit happens, a report arrives, findings get exported to a spreadsheet, and months later the cycle repeats while risk builds up in between. Our digital accessibility platform is built to end that cycle.
Our specialists define the platforms, templates, and user journeys in scope, then combine automated testing with manual assessment, keyboard and screen-reader testing, and testing informed by lived experience. The findings land on a live dashboard instead of a static PDF, prioritized by severity, referenced to the relevant guidelines, and connected to your development team’s existing workflow through our Jira integration. Continuous monitoring tracks what changes between audits. You always know where your accessibility stands, and your team has a structured way to act on it. As next steps Accessiway can train your team and help you to be independent in the long run.
Frequently asked questions about accessibility audits
How much does an accessibility audit cost?
The cost of an accessibility audit depends on the scope of the assessment, including the digital properties, pages, templates, user journeys, languages, environments, and accessibility criteria included. At Accessiway, accessibility audits are included within platform plans rather than sold as a standalone service.
Accessiway annual plans start from €1,500/year. The plans differ in the depth of the audit, automated monitoring, reporting, remediation support, and expert services included.
Bronze provides a structured starting point with the Accessiway Platform, a multilingual dashboard, an accessibility statement/conformance report, and a basic audit against WCAG 2.2 AA. It does not include automated WCAG scans or expert manual audit services.
Silver includes everything in Bronze, plus a comprehensive expert audit against WCAG 2.2 AA, continuous monitoring, weekly automated WCAG scans, scan email recaps, remediation guidance, an accessibility badge, standard litigation support in the EU and USA, and unlimited support. It also includes 1 expert review hour per year and a WCAG 2.2 AA + EAA report.
Gold includes everything in Silver, with daily automated WCAG scans, scan email recaps, a company-level view, retesting, premium litigation support in the EU and USA, governance across sites and touchpoints, and 3 expert review hours per year.
Enterprise provides a custom solution tailored to the organization's digital ecosystem, including daily automated WCAG scans, scan email recaps, company-level visibility, expert audit and reporting capabilities, custom litigation support, and custom expert review hours.
Specialist services such as usability testing and document remediation can also be added when needed, without changing the core plan.
For the most accurate and up-to-date details, see the Accessiway pricing page for the current plan comparison in depth.
How long does an accessibility audit take?
The time required for an accessibility audit depends on the number of pages, templates, components, journeys, applications, languages, and testing environments included in the scope.
Which tools do accessibility auditors use?
Auditors combine scanners, assistive technology, and inspection tools. Common automated tools include axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse, and Accessibility Insights for Web. Manual testing uses screen readers such as NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, and TalkBack, alongside contrast checkers and browser developer tools. Document work uses Adobe Acrobat Pro and PAC.
Can an in-house team conduct an accessibility audit?
Yes. Internal teams can and should build accessibility checks into everyday delivery. A specialist-led assessment adds focused expertise, an independent perspective, and structured testing across an agreed scope, which is usually what procurement and conformance documentation ask for.
Does an automated scan prove that a website is accessible?
No. Automated tools find some barriers efficiently, and they can’t assess every requirement or judge whether a task is understandable and usable. Combine them with manual and assistive-technology testing.
Does an accessibility audit guarantee legal compliance?
No. An audit assesses an agreed scope against agreed criteria and provides remediation guidance. Legal obligations depend on the jurisdiction, the sector, the product, and the circumstances.
Does an accessibility audit include PDFs, video, and third-party services?
It can, and inclusion depends on the agreed scope. Identify these assets during preparation, because they’re often essential to a user journey and each needs its own assessment approach. Auditors evaluate PDFs against PDF/UA as well as WCAG.
Do mobile apps need a separate accessibility audit?
Native mobile apps need their own evaluation, and a responsive website viewed on a phone stays part of the web audit. WCAG is scoped to web content, so auditors assess native apps through WCAG2ICT or through EN 301 549 Chapter 11, which adapts the same criteria to software. The testing doesn’t transfer either: mobile screen readers use gesture navigation instead of tab order, platform accessibility APIs differ from the web, and keyboard testing needs an external keyboard connected to the device.
What is screen-reader testing?
Screen-reader testing examines how people who use screen readers receive and interact with digital content. It checks whether controls have meaningful names, whether the structure is clear, and whether dynamic updates are announced usefully.
You can start with a free accessibility scan for an initial view of where your site stands.
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