What to actually do, in the order that works.
Most accessibility advice tells you what conformance means and stops there. This is the sequence — nine steps, what each one produces, roughly how long it takes, and an honest split between what your own team can handle and what genuinely needs a specialist.
Nine steps, in this order for a reason.
Skipping ahead is the most common and most expensive mistake. Remediating before you have an inventory means fixing the wrong things first; buying a platform before accessibility is in procurement means inheriting someone else's defects.
Step three assumes you know which standard you are held to. If you do not, start with which regulations reach your organisation — the answer usually resolves to WCAG Level AA, but which rule gets you there changes what evidence you need.
Find out where you stand
Run an automated scan for a first signal, then get a real audit of your highest-traffic pages. You cannot budget for, procure, or defend work you have not scoped.
Inventory everything public-facing
Catalogue the main site, department microsites, mobile apps, document libraries and every third-party portal. Most organisations find more than they expected, and the things they forget are usually the ones residents depend on.
Name your standard and your owner
Write a short policy naming WCAG 2.1 Level AA and one accountable person with the authority to stop a launch. Shared responsibility with no name attached loses every prioritisation conversation.
Fix what blocks people first
Remediate barriers that stop someone completing a task outright - navigation, forms, checkout, permitting, payments - before anything cosmetic, regardless of how cheap the cosmetic fixes are.
Fix at the component level
Correct shared components and the design system so every template inherits the fix. Twenty missing labels are usually one component rendered twenty times.
Deal with the documents
Inventory the PDF library, retire what is obsolete, convert high-traffic forms to accessible HTML, and remediate only what genuinely must remain a document. Then fix the templates so new documents are born accessible.
Push accessibility into procurement
Require a named standard, a current VPAT, a test method and acceptance criteria in RFPs and renewals, so the next platform you buy does not recreate the problem.
Train the people who publish
Give content authors, designers and developers the four or five things their own role can get wrong. Most long-tail failures are authoring habits, not code.
Publish your statement and keep testing
Publish an accessibility statement with a working feedback path, then monitor on a schedule. Conformance is a claim at a point in time, not a permanent status.
What you can do without us.
We would rather you spend money where it changes the outcome. Several of these steps do not need a consultant, and saying so is not against our interest — it is how you end up trusting the parts where we say you do.
Do this yourself
- Run our free checker on your key pages
- Write the policy and name an owner
- Fix alt text, headings and link text
- Retire obsolete documents
- Publish an accessibility statement
Doable in-house with guidance
- Design fixes: contrast, focus, target size
- Component remediation, if you have developers
- Converting forms from PDF to HTML
- Procurement language and VPAT review
- Training your own content authors
Where a specialist earns it
- The audit — manual and assistive technology testing
- Judging which findings are real and which are noise
- Sequencing remediation by impact, not by page count
- Holding vendors to their VPAT claims
- Producing evidence that stands up to scrutiny
How that runs: audits, remediation, and training and governance.
Judge an accessibility firm the way we'd judge one.
Everyone in this market says they care about accessibility. Here is what we would actually check, and where we stand on each — all of it verifiable from this site without talking to us.
Does their own site pass?
We ran our checker across all 117 pages of this site and fixed everything it found — a 2.04:1 contrast failure on our own process numbers, nav links under the target size minimum, heading skips on fifteen pages. Our accessibility statement lists what it found and what is still imperfect.
Will they show their method?
The full 55-criterion reference we audit against is published, in plain language, with the failure we see most often for each. It is the working reference behind our audits, given away because it is more useful to you than it is proprietary to us.
Do they gate the useful part?
The checker runs 31 WCAG-mapped checks in your browser and shows the findings and a remediation plan immediately. No email, no account, nothing uploaded. If it tells you that you do not need us, that is a real answer.
Do they oversell what tools can do?
We publish an article arguing that automated testing catches roughly a third of WCAG, and our own tool repeats that caveat in its own results. A vendor whose scanner claims conformance is telling you something about the vendor.
Where do they stand on overlays?
We will not install one, at any price. They do not produce conformance, much of the disability community rejects them, and they have been named in accessibility litigation. This is the fastest way to sort accessibility firms into two groups.
Will they scope honestly?
Our engagements page carries a "what we won't do" list. We would rather tell you a baseline is all you need right now than sell a programme you cannot absorb — including when the honest answer is "fix four things and re-check in six months".
Four ways this goes.
| Approach | What it costs | What it actually covers | Evidence if challenged |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do nothing | Nothing now | Nothing. Barriers stay, and new ones arrive with every publish. | None. The weakest position there is. |
| Install an overlay | A subscription, indefinitely | A settings widget and automated guesses. Not your documents, not your vendor portals, not your markup. | A compliance badge that overstates your position, which is worse than silence. |
| Ask your web agency | Usually a line item on other work | Varies enormously. Often a scanner report, which covers about a third of WCAG. | Depends entirely on whether they tested manually. Ask them. |
| Work with a specialist | Scoped to the finding, in phases | Manual and assistive technology testing, documents and vendor platforms included, fixed at component level. | Audit findings, a dated remediation plan with owners, and verification per finding. |
We are obviously not neutral about the last row. But the second row is the one worth being certain about, and you can verify that one without us — ask any overlay vendor for a conformance claim they will put in a contract.
Step one costs nothing and takes ten minutes.
You do not need a proposal to begin. Run the checker on the three pages that matter most — your homepage, your main form, and whatever a resident or customer uses to actually get something done. You will have a real finding list and a remediation plan before you have talked to anyone.
Bring that to us and the first conversation starts from your actual site rather than a discovery call. If it turns out your team can clear it, we will say so.
Buying as a public agency? Contracting paths, vendor information and scope language you can route internally are on the public sector page.
Free, no email required
- Accessibility Checker — 31 checks on your own pages
- Accessibility Score — score your programme in 10 questions
- WCAG Checklist — 31 manual checks
- Criteria Reference — all 55 in plain language
Working to a deadline? See the ADA Title II countdown.
What people ask before they start.
Can we make our website WCAG compliant ourselves?
Partly, and the parts you can do yourself are worth doing. Content authors can fix alt text, heading structure and link text; designers can fix contrast, focus indicators and target sizes. What usually needs outside help is the audit itself, because roughly two thirds of WCAG cannot be evaluated by a tool, and the component-level remediation that follows.
How long does WCAG 2.1 AA conformance take?
An audit of a typical site runs a few weeks. Remediation depends entirely on how the site was built: a coherent design system can be largely fixed in one cycle, while a decade of accumulated templates and an untagged PDF library is a phased programme measured in quarters. The document backlog is usually the longest pole.
What should we do first if we have a deadline?
A scoped baseline. Not a full programme, not a redesign - an audit of your highest-impact pages that produces a number you can take into a budget request and a scope you can put into a solicitation. Everything else depends on it, and procurement timelines are usually the binding constraint.
Do we need a specialist, or will our web agency do?
Ask them one question: which assistive technologies did you test with, on which platforms, and which criteria did you evaluate manually? A team that does this work answers specifically. If the answer is vague, or the deliverable is a scanner report, you are buying something you could have generated yourself in an afternoon.