How a web accessibility audit evaluates your site against WCAG 2.2 AA — what's involved, what it covers, and how to prioritize what to fix.
A web accessibility audit is a systematic evaluation of a website against established accessibility standards. The current baseline for web accessibility compliance is WCAG 2.2 AA. The goal is to understand where a site creates barriers for people with disabilities, how serious those barriers are, and what it would take to fix them.
Accessibility audits aren't only about legal compliance, though that's a legitimate reason many organizations start here. A site that works for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technologies is also a better-structured, more usable site for everyone.
When you need an accessibility audit.
You don't know where you stand. Accessibility matters, but without a systematic review, it's hard to understand the actual scope of the problem before investing in fixes.
You've received a complaint or legal notice. If an organization has been contacted about accessibility concerns, a structured audit is the first step toward a documented remediation plan.
You're planning a redesign or CMS migration. The best time to address accessibility is before a rebuild, not after. An audit of the current site surfaces the patterns to avoid carrying forward.
Your team is making accessibility changes but isn't sure they're working. Automated tools catch roughly 30–40% of accessibility issues. If the team has been running scans but not manual testing, there are likely problems that haven't surfaced yet.
You're in a regulated industry. Healthcare, financial services, higher education, and government-adjacent organizations often face heightened accessibility requirements. An audit provides the documentation to support compliance efforts.
What's involved in a web accessibility audit.
Technical accessibility audit — A combination of automated scanning and manual testing against current WCAG standards. Automated tools identify structural issues quickly — missing alt text, improper heading hierarchy, form label problems. Manual testing, including screen reader evaluation, catches what tools miss: focus order problems, dynamic content that doesn't announce correctly, keyboard traps, and interaction patterns that break for assistive technology users.
Content accessibility assessment — Accessibility isn't only a development problem — it's an editorial one too. This review looks at how content is written and structured: whether page titles are descriptive, whether images have meaningful alternative text (not just any alt text), whether link text is specific enough to make sense out of context, and whether the overall reading level and structure serve the broadest possible audience. Editorial issues often outnumber technical ones on established sites.
Findings and remediation report — All issues from both reviews get documented, organized by severity and site area, and scored by effort and impact. The result is a prioritized roadmap — not a flat list of everything that's wrong, but a clear sequence for addressing issues in an order that makes sense for the team and the organization's risk profile.
What you get.
A technical audit report, a content accessibility assessment, and a consolidated findings and remediation roadmap with issues prioritized by severity, effort, and impact. The roadmap is designed to be actionable by internal teams — development, content, and design — with clear ownership for each category of issue.
What comes after.
Remediation work typically splits into two tracks: development fixes (code-level issues like ARIA markup, focus management, and keyboard handling) and editorial fixes (content-level issues like alt text, heading structure, and link clarity). Some organizations address these in parallel; others sequence them. Either way, accessibility is an ongoing practice, and a review cadence after the initial remediation helps prevent new issues from growing.