Accessibility
An accessibility audit that ends in fixes, not a colour coded spreadsheet.
Most accessibility reports are an automated scan exported to a document, which finds roughly a third of the problems and none of the ones that stop somebody using your site. This is a WCAG 2.2 AA audit done with a keyboard and a screen reader as well as a scanner, delivered as a ranked list with the fix for each, and implemented on the codebase where we have access.
Why now
The legal position moved, and a lot of businesses have not noticed.
Not legal advice, and worth taking your own. But the timeline is a matter of public record and it is more advanced than most people assume.
The Equality Act already applied
The duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people has covered services delivered online for years. Nothing about it is new, and it is the reason the question was never really optional in the UK.
The European Accessibility Act is in force
- Applied since June 2025, so no deadline is left
- Covers ecommerce, banking, ticketing, ebooks, transport and more
- Who you sell to is the test, not location
Public sector duties are separate
UK public sector bodies carry their own regulations, including a published accessibility statement that has to be accurate. An out of date statement is its own problem, and they are frequently years stale.
The commercial argument, which is usually the stronger one
Around one in five people has a disability, and a checkout that cannot be completed with a keyboard loses that order in the same way a broken payment form does. Accessibility work overlaps heavily with plain usability: clearer labels, specific error messages, sensible focus order and readable contrast improve conversion for everybody, not only for the users the standard was written for.
The problem with most audits
A scanner finds about a third of it.
This is the single most useful thing to understand before buying an accessibility audit from anybody, including us.
What a scanner does find
- Contrast ratios below the threshold
- Images with no alt attribute at all
- Form inputs with no associated label
- Missing document language and page titles
What only a person finds
- Alt text present but describing the wrong thing
- Focus order that jumps around the page
- Modals a keyboard can open but not escape
- Custom dropdowns announced as a div
On overlay widgets
If you have been sold a script that promises compliance once installed, be aware that these have been the subject of a large number of US lawsuits brought against sites that had one running. They cannot repair semantics they did not author, and they can actively interfere with the assistive technology a user has already configured to their own preferences. Run the free scanners by all means. Do not buy the widget.
Scope
What the audit covers.
Tested against WCAG 2.2 at level AA, which is the level almost every legal framework points at, including EN 301 549 in the EU.
Keyboard only
Every journey that matters completed without a mouse: navigation, search, filters, forms and checkout. Focus visible at all times, no traps, and a skip link that goes somewhere useful.
Screen reader
The same journeys with a screen reader running, because a page can pass every automated check and still be incomprehensible when read aloud in order.
Structure and semantics
Headings that describe the document and leave the styling to CSS, landmarks, lists that are lists, and tables with real headers. The part that also happens to help a crawler.
Forms and errors
Labels bound to inputs, errors announced and specific, required fields marked in more than colour, and a checkout that survives a mistake without losing what was typed.
Media and motion
Captions on video, alternatives for audio, nothing that autoplays and traps attention, and reduced motion respected for users who have asked their device for it.
Components and templates
Audited at the template level, because a broken accordion appears on four hundred URLs and gets fixed once. The same logic as everything else here.
Out of scope
What this does not include.
A compliance certificate. Nobody can issue one that means anything. Accessibility is a property of a site at a moment, and it degrades the next time somebody publishes a page with an unlabelled image. What you can have is an accurate statement of where you stand and a plan, which is what regulators and courts look for.
Legal advice. We can tell you which WCAG criteria a page fails and what it costs a user. Whether that creates liability for your organisation is a question for a solicitor, and we will tell you so. We do not guess at it.
Testing with disabled users. Genuine user testing with people who rely on assistive technology daily is more valuable than any audit, ours included, and it is a specialist service we do not provide. For a large public facing service, budget for it alongside this.
A one off fix that stays fixed. If your team publishes content, accessibility has to be a habit. Projects end. Part of the useful output here is the short list of rules your editors need, which is usually about six things and not a training course.
FAQ
Questions about accessibility
Is my website legally required to be accessible?
This is not legal advice and you should take your own, but here is the shape of it. In the UK the Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and it has always applied to services delivered online as well as to buildings. UK public sector bodies carry a separate, more specific duty with a published accessibility statement.
If you sell into the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025, so the obligation is already live. It reaches a lot of ordinary commerce: ecommerce, banking, ticketing, ebooks and transport among others. Plenty of UK businesses are inside its scope because of who they sell to, wherever they happen to be based.
What standard do you test against?
WCAG 2.2 at level AA, which is what almost every legal framework points at in practice. The EU standard EN 301 549 wraps WCAG for European purposes, and UK public sector regulations reference it too, so testing to AA covers the substance of both.
Level AAA exists and is not a sensible target for a whole site. Parts of it are impossible for some content types, and the standard itself says so.
Can a plugin or overlay make my site compliant?
No, and this is the single most expensive misconception in the field. Overlay widgets that promise compliance in a line of JavaScript do not deliver it: they cannot fix semantics they did not author, they frequently interfere with the screen readers real users already have configured, and they have been the subject of a large number of US lawsuits against sites that had one installed.
Accessibility plugins for WordPress can help with specific, narrow things such as skip links or a sensible focus outline. What none of them can do is fix a heading order that carries no meaning, an image with no alternative text, or a form that cannot be completed with a keyboard. Those are in your markup, and they get fixed in your markup.
How much of this can automated testing find?
Somewhere around a third of issues, and the figure is worth taking seriously in both directions. Automated tools are excellent at contrast ratios, missing alt attributes, form labels and landmark structure, and you should absolutely run them because they are free and fast.
What they cannot judge is whether alt text is accurate, whether a focus order makes sense, whether an error message tells someone what to do, or whether a custom component behaves the way a screen reader user expects. That is manual work with a keyboard and a screen reader, and it is where the real findings come from.
Does accessibility help SEO?
Partly, and the precise answer is more useful than selling it as a ranking hack. Genuine overlap exists: a logical heading structure, descriptive link text, alt attributes, semantic landmarks and captions are all things both a screen reader and a crawler read. Fixing them tends to help both.
But contrast ratios, focus indicators and keyboard traps do not affect rankings at all, and anyone telling you an accessible site ranks better as a rule is overselling. Do it because it is the right thing and because of the legal position. Treat the SEO benefit as a genuine side effect, never the reason.
What do I get?
A prioritised list of real issues, each with the WCAG criterion it fails, where it occurs, what it costs a user in practice, and the specific fix. Ranked by user impact and legal exposure. A crawler's instance count does not set the order.
Where we have access to the codebase we implement the fixes ourselves, which is the same arrangement as the rest of the work here. Where we do not, findings are written so your developers can act on them without a translation layer.
Keep reading
Related
Book me
Want to know where your site stands?
Send the domain and the journey that matters most, usually checkout or enquiry. You get a clear answer on the serious failures, whether an overlay has made things worse, and what a fix would take.