Website Accessibility Audit: What to Check Before You Pay for One
A good accessibility audit should help your team understand risk, reproduce issues, prioritize remediation, and document limitations. The right starting point depends on the site, audience, and business process.
Updated 2026-07-07
Automated scan versus manual audit
Automated scans are useful for fast, repeatable technical checks across public pages. Manual audits add human judgment for journeys, assistive technology behavior, content meaning, PDFs, and ambiguous results.
What automated tools often catch
Common automated findings include missing accessible names, missing form labels, missing language attributes, incorrect landmarks, color contrast issues, missing page titles, disabled zoom, and some ARIA misuse.
What manual review adds
Manual review checks whether real users can complete meaningful journeys. That includes keyboard-only checkout, screen reader announcements, focus order, error recovery, content quality, and document usability.
Evidence and prioritization
A useful report should include screenshots, selectors where possible, WCAG mapping, issue grouping, severity, affected pages, and a developer checklist. Priority should reflect user impact, occurrence count, and business-critical flows.
Important note
This guide is educational and supports technical accessibility planning. It is not legal advice, does not certify compliance, and should be paired with manual review where risk matters.