What Is an Accessibility Website Audit?
An accessibility audit of a website is a check that evaluates whether people with different abilities can use it without trouble. It’s basically someone going through your pages, testing how they work with assistive tools, checking the code, and looking for anything that might block or confuse users. The result is a clear list of what works, what doesn’t, and what you should fix to make your site easier for everyone to use.
Most website accessibility audit services follow WCAG 2.2, the current global standard. But just like there’ve been WCAG 2.0 and 2.1, we’re sure new versions will follow. How we use tech keeps changing. That’s why accessibility isn’t a one-time deal, and why reputable providers highlight the need for a maintenance strategy rather than a single check.
WCAG is built on four main ideas: a website must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. These ideas make up the POUR principles, which state that:
- Users must be able to “sense” your site, regardless of whether they rely on sight, hearing, or another sense.
- Users must be able to use your site, regardless of the interaction mode (mouse, keyboard, or assistive tech).
- Users must be able to follow your site regardless of their abilities. This means predictable flows, no complex or tricky actions, etc.
- Users must be able to access your site on any device. So, you need to ensure compatibility with older environments, a wide range of OSs and their versions, etc.
When you conduct a website accessibility audit, you also need to be aware of the WCAG 2.2 levels.
- Level A means completing 32 success criteria from the WCAG requirements (basic must-haves).
- Level AA means completing 56 (what most businesses must aim for).
- Level AAA means completing 86 (when very strict accessibility is needed, e.g., in government portals).
Keep in mind that your site can be at level AA but complete fewer criteria. For example, if you don’t use audio, then media‑related aspects aren’t relevant.
So, what you should take away from this is that during an accessibility audit for a website, you need to secure compliance with WCAG 2.2 level AA. Doesn’t look that complicated, right? Well, that’s not the whole story.
Why Audit a Website for Accessibility?
Conducting an accessibility audit for a website helps you figure out whether your product complies with the EAA. So you can:
- Avoid legal troubles and fines, which can go up to €1,000,000 per violation.
- Improve your site’s visibility by using proper headings, alt text, and semantic structure to enhance your SEO.
- Expand your potential user pool by 107 million people (yes, that’s how many EU citizens have a disability).
- Demonstrate that you’re a reliable partner with VPAT/ACR website accessibility audit templates. These can open doors to partnerships, contracts, and business growth.
- Refine user trust by showing your commitment to inclusivity and social responsibility.
You probably know all this already. But you might not have noticed that these make up only half of the value of an accessibility audit for a website. And this is how professional QA accessibility testing really changes things up.
Real-World Testing across Devices & Tools
Experts don’t just check the code. They test your site on different devices, browsers, and with assistive technologies. Your product becomes not just EAA-compliant but also usable in real-world scenarios.
Prioritized, Actionable Guidance
Professionals don’t just hand you a list of issues and say “bye”. They assess which problems pose the greatest barriers to users and which are easier to fix. Then, your team can focus their efforts where they matter most, securing fast, significant value gains. You’ll also save time and money by avoiding trial-and-error corrections. Early fixes are a lot less expensive than retrofits.
Embedding Accessibility into Workflows
Some website accessibility audit companies offer guidance on how to integrate accessibility into design, development, and QA processes. For instance, designers can learn how to structure content clearly, developers how to implement ARIA roles correctly, and engineers how to check new features consistently. This makes accessibility part of your everyday workflow, not a one-off task.
Roadmap for Ongoing Improvement
Websites evolve constantly. And so should accessibility practices. Experts provide a long-term strategy, indicating which areas need regular review, how to monitor changes, and how to maintain accessibility as new features are added. They teach you how to turn accessibility into a sustainable practice.
Skill Development for Your Team
Working with experts exposes teams to practical techniques, standards, and best practices. Over time, this raises the internal crew’s capability, making future projects more accessible and reducing reliance on external audits.
Structured Documentation for Tracking
Professional website accessibility audits provide organized reports with clear explanations, priorities, and recommendations. This helps teams track progress, coordinate work, and plan future updates with confidence.
Unbiased Evaluation
Internal teams often get used to how your product works. This can create blind spots, making them overlook accessibility barriers. An external QA company brings an outside perspective. And their expertise enables them to identify subtle issues that can drastically improve your site.
These are the real, long-term benefits of an accessibility audit of a website. It helps build accessibility into your processes so it can be maintained. Because if you treat it as a one-time thing, your product will enjoy the benefits of EAA compliance only until the very first tiny change.
For example, let’s say you’ve done the audit, fixed all the issues, and are now enjoying the newfound advantages. But then, you change the color of an “Add to cart” button to red and green for the upcoming holidays. It would look fine to most users. But those with red-green color blindness (the most common type) only notice a grey blob that doesn’t provide any information and doesn’t signify the festive mood.
If you don’t hold regular evaluations or embed accessibility into your practices, each update will chip away at the value the initial audit provided. Simply put, website accessibility audits offer a strategy that makes accessibility and its perks long-lived.
How to Audit a Website for Accessibility?
When conducting an accessibility audit for a website, you’ll want to follow the fundamental five-step roadmap:
- Defining what you’ll be checking and how.
- Running automated scans to eliminate basic issues and locate hot spots.
- Manually reviewing realistic user scenarios.
- Plugging in assistive technology to secure compatibility.
- Reporting on the issues found and designing a next steps plan.
Let’s take a closer look at each step in the website accessibility audit process.
Step 1: Defining the Scope & Standards
An audit begins by deciding what will be tested and which standards the site must meet. You don’t really need to check every single page. The goal is to map the site’s structure and identify the templates, flows, and unique components that define how the whole system works. Most websites reuse the same building blocks across hundreds of URLs. So testing those core patterns is far more effective than reviewing every instance.
Step 2: The Automated Scan
Next, use website accessibility audit tools to catch surface-level issues — syntax errors, missing alt text, empty links, etc. They’re fast and helpful for spotting repeated mistakes and issue clusters. But they only catch roughly a third of actual accessibility problems.
Step 3: Manual Review
This is why manual software testing services come into play afterward. A specialist goes through the interface, checking tab order, focus states, and whether all interactive elements behave properly. They also review the underlying HTML and ARIA to confirm that structure, roles, and relationships make sense. This step uncovers what automation just can’t — invisible focus, mislabeled components, or interactions that break when you stop using a mouse.
Seeing this probably made you worry about the time hand inspections usually take. Yes, they’re comparatively slow. Yet, you simply can’t skip them. Check our article on how to do accessibility testing manually for expert tips on speeding up the process and keeping your checks productive.
Step 4: Assistive Technology Verification
Once the fundamentals check out, the site is tested with real assistive technologies. Screen readers reveal how content is announced and whether the experience matches what a user expects to hear. Screen magnifiers show how the layout behaves when users zoom in or rely on enhanced contrast. You’re checking authentic scenarios and preparing your product for real life.
Step 5: Reporting & Remediation Strategy
The audit ends with a clear, structured report — not just a list of issues. Problems are grouped by severity so teams know what blocks access and what’s minor. Then comes the practical part: a remediation roadmap. It outlines what to fix first, how to fix it, and who needs to be involved. This turns the website accessibility audit from a diagnostic exercise into an actionable plan.
Remember that accessibility shouldn’t stop after the audit. To prevent problems from creeping back, it’s crucial to embed accessibility into ongoing development. Include it in design and code reviews, make it part of your QA process, and train teams on accessible patterns.
Website Accessibility Audit Checklist
The criteria you’ll be testing against depend on your product and goals. For example, if you don’t have images, you don’t need alt text for them. And if you don’t include animations, the timing aspect is lost. Similarly, if you’re aiming for compliance level A, around half of the success criteria aren’t in the picture. So, website accessibility audit checklists can look very different.
But since in most cases you’ll be aiming for WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, here’s a summary of points you’ll need to cover.
Text & Non-Text Alternatives
- Provide descriptive alt text for images, icons, and charts.
- Offer captions for video, transcripts for audio, and audio descriptions for video where needed.
- Ensure content doesn’t rely solely on color to convey information.
Content Presentation & Readability
- Ensure text is readable: clear fonts, sufficient size, line spacing, and contrast (minimum 4.5:1 for normal text).
- Allow content to reflow and remain usable at higher zoom levels (up to 400%).
- Maintain logical structure with meaningful headings, labels, and landmarks.
Keyboard & Navigation
- All interactive elements are fully operable via keyboard and feature visible focus indicators.
- Navigation is consistent and predictable. Menus, links, and controls behave as expected.
- Provide multiple ways to access important content (search, menus, landmarks).
Forms & Input
- Label all form fields clearly. Provide instructions and error messages.
- Offer suggestions to fix errors and prevent mistakes where possible.
- Ensure forms and interactive elements are accessible via assistive tech.
Timing & Interaction
- Provide enough time for users to read and interact with content or allow adjustable timing.
- Avoid content that can trigger seizures (no flashing or strobing effects).
Assistive Technology & Robustness
- Use semantic HTML and correct ARIA roles so content works with screen readers, magnifiers, etc.
- Verify the site works across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies.
Understandable & Predictable
- Ensure text content is clear and consistent in terminology.
- Interactive elements behave predictably. Users always know what will happen when they act.
- Avoid sudden changes of context (like unexpected page reloads or focus jumps).
When running an accessibility audit for a website, we recommend paying special attention to unique qualities. They make websites what they are. And they may be the reason people find them most comfortable to use. So keep an eye on things like multi-level and mega menus, hyperlinks, and linked images, etc.
What Website Accessibility Audit Tools to Use?
During a website accessibility audit, you’ll be using a mix of automated and manual tools as well as assistive tech to:
- Quickly scan pages to catch obvious issues.
- Check how the site actually works for users.
- See how your site “cooperates” with real assistive technologies.
There’s a wide selection of options. So getting lost isn’t that hard. Our team recommends focusing on those that go beyond just flagging errors. Because otherwise it’ll be like going to a doctor, getting diagnosed with migraines, and being sent home right after. Good website accessibility audit tools should provide clear explanations, suggest fixes, and integrate into development. They shouldn’t be a “quick band-aid” but a long-term helper.
Let’s review a few options we’ve found very useful in our practice.
Automated Website Accessibility Audit Tools
- axe DevTools and Lighthouse provide in-browser scanning of page HTML and ARIA markup. They highlight errors inline, offer detailed code references, and give step-by-step guidance for fixes. They can generate full-page reports, check multiple WCAG criteria at once, and integrate with CI/CD pipelines.
- WAVE adds visual overlays on pages to mark missing headings, ARIA roles, color contrast issues, and form label problems. It includes icons with explanations, allows toggling issues on/off, and can export a report of all detected issues.
- Screaming Frog crawls the entire website and produces structured reports of HTML, CSS, and link-related issues. It can check for broken links, duplicate content, missing alt attributes, and page structure issues, and can export CSV/XML for detailed analysis.
- Pa11y is a command-line tool that scans web pages for WCAG violations. It features customizable rulesets and can run multiple page tests in parallel.
Screen Readers for Website Accessibility Audit
- NVDA reads out page content via synthesized speech. It offers interactive element navigation, heading and landmark navigation, support for ARIA roles, and live region updates to track dynamic content changes.
- JAWS supplies advanced speech and braille output, including keyboard shortcuts for headings, links, and form elements, table navigation, customizable verbosity, and reading modes.
- VoiceOver and TalkBack are mobile screen readers with gesture-based navigation. They support dynamic content updates and rotor features that let you jump between headings, links, and form fields.
- Narrator reads content and interactive elements using built-in Windows voices. It supports basic heading, link, and form navigation, and provides real-time feedback.
Contrast Checkers for Website Accessibility Audit
- WebAIM Contrast Checker allows you to enter foreground and background colors. It instantly calculates contrast ratio and shows whether it meets WCAG AA or AAA.
- Colour Contrast Analyser lets you sample colors from anywhere on the screen. It simulates various vision deficiencies and evaluates contrast compliance against WCAG.
Screen Magnifiers for Website Accessibility Audit
- ZoomText magnifies screen content up to 60×. It lets you choose different magnification “windows” (full screen, lens, docked, overlay), supports high‑quality text rendering, custom cursor/pointer size and color, color filters or invert‑color modes, and dual‑monitor support.
- MAGic has similar magnification and screen enhancement capabilities. It offers configurable magnification levels, focus and cursor enhancements, and the ability to adjust color/contrast for better readability.
You should note that not everyone has experience with these tools. So, you should consider upskilling your engineers or working with a provider specializing in WCAG accessibility audit services. This way, you can get instant access to the exact professionals you need.
In-House vs Outsourced Website Accessibility Audit
As you can see, running an accessibility audit for a website is much more complex than checking boxes on a list. You need infrastructure, precise skills, tools… And we can’t forget about everyone’s favourite duo — budget and time pressure.
If your team isn’t constrained by any of these factors, an internal audit makes the most sense. Just keep in mind that in-house crews often have biases. They know how the widget is supposed to work, so they use it “correctly”, often missing the struggles a first-time user with a disability might face.
To counteract this, you can rotate engineers. Have someone unfamiliar with the feature examine it, simulating a new user’s perspective. You can also include people with disabilities in testing. Their first-hand experience can reveal issues that seasoned team members overlook.
When to Outsource an Accessibility Audit for a Website?
On the other hand, external website accessibility audit services are best when you need:
- Fast, effective, and standardized processes.
- Ready-to-deploy accessibility specialists.
- Full access to assistive technologies, devices, and testing infrastructure without investing in them yourself.
- Reliable expertise in WCAG standards, ARIA, and real-world assistive technology workflows.
- Independent, unbiased evaluation by a third party, which carries more weight with regulators and procurement departments.
- Clear, actionable remediation guidance for your developers and stakeholders.
- Time savings for internal teams, letting them focus on core product development.
- Scalable resources for testing multiple products, pages, or platforms simultaneously.
- Experience with edge cases and complex interactions that in-house teams may not have encountered.
- Insights and recommendations that help improve long-term accessibility practices.
Simply put, if you’re not sure that your team can run an accessibility audit for a website properly, allow experts to handle it for you.
What Is the Website Accessibility Audit Price?
For a small or mid‑sized website, budgeting $2,000–6,000 is realistic for a proper WCAG audit. For a larger, complex site, expect costs easily above $5,000, potentially $10,000+ depending on scale and depth. But overall, there’s no one set website accessibility audit cost. Because it’s heavily influenced by the complexity of the website, the number of unique templates, and the conformance level you’re aiming for.
So, let’s not focus so much on the numbers. Instead, let’s break down the pricing models you’ll encounter. Figuring out how they function can help you save money.
Per-Page/Per-Template Pricing
The price is based on how many unique layouts your website has. Not how many total pages exist. Auditors test each template in depth (e.g., homepage, product page, blog post, checkout), and all pages built from the same template inherit the same findings. The website accessibility audit cost increases as you add more unique layouts or flows.
This pricing model is the best fit for websites with lots of pages but only a few repeating layouts. For example, it would work well with blogs, news sites, e-commerce stores, documentation hubs, or CMS-driven sites.
Hourly-Rate Model
Here, you pay for the auditor’s time rather than the number of pages or templates. The auditor works through your site step by step, testing everything included in scope. And the final cost depends on how many hours the work takes. This model is best when your site is complex, has many custom interactions, or when you need flexibility (e.g., testing only certain flows, reviewing design drafts, or getting expert help on demand).
Hybrid Packages
This model combines a fixed-price base with a flexible, hourly component. The base usually covers core templates or key user flows. The hourly portion is used for extras like complex widgets, dynamic content, or additional pages you decide to include later.
Here’s an example of what it might look like. A provider offers a set website accessibility audit price for checking 50 of your pages. They don’t go beyond the agreed-upon scope. If you decide that you want to evaluate other elements, like a new feature you recently added, you’ll have to pay for it separately.
This model works best when you want predictable pricing for the essentials but still need room to adjust the scope as the project evolves.
Project-Based Estimate
In this case, the provider defines the total cost for the entire website accessibility audit upfront. Auditors review it as a complete project, covering pages, templates, flows, or features included in the estimate. This model works best when you have a clear scope and timeline, aim for a comprehensive assessment with predictable budgeting, and want no surprises as the work progresses.
Keep in mind that website accessibility audit services are in high demand right now. You might come across “special deals” that seem like a bargain of a lifetime, but actually offer little value. Or you might face artificially inflated prices. So, before you focus on the cost, research the provider if you choose to work with one.
To Sum Up
A website accessibility audit isn’t required by the EAA. It’s an investment in your product’s quality, legal safety, and market expansion. And you should approach it as such. Make sure you have the resources needed to do it right. And reach out to professionals when you need assistance. The price of half-baked efforts is too high.
QA Madness can help you cover full WCAG 2.2 testing and turn the results into a you-fitted roadmap for refining accessibility and gaining a competitive advantage. Our ISTQB-certified specialists have vast experience with assistive technologies and digital inclusivity. They know how to turn EAA compliance into a fully-fledged part of your success strategy. More importantly, they know how to make real users love your product.
