How to Perform a Comprehensive WCAG Audit

If you have a business, chances are you don’t want to exclude potential customers.  Unfortunately, if you’re not making your website accessible, that’s precisely what’s happening. 

People with disabilities are 50% more likely to face barriers when using online services compared with those without. One of the reasons why this is happening is because many organisations don’t know how to properly assess their websites against established accessibility standards and either leave it for the future or ignore it altogether.

However, businesses need to do better. As Kristina Barrick at Scope rightly points out in the Lloyds Bank UK Consumer Digital Index 2020:

Beyond the ethical importance of inclusivity, organisations now face mounting legal pressure to meet accessibility requirements. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) lawsuits increased by 320% from 2013–2021, and the European Accessibility Act’s new directive came into effect in June, forcing businesses in the EU to comply with their accessibility standards.

So, how do you avoid legal troubles and make sure your website is fully accessible? The best start is a WCAG audit, which is a thorough evaluation of your website against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These are internationally recognised standards developed to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities. 

While the guidelines themselves are freely available, conducting a proper audit requires expertise, specialised tools, and a methodical approach that many teams lack. That’s why only trained professionals can be trusted to do one in the first place. Still, if you want to know more about what happens behind the curtains, we’ll walk you through all the important steps of a WCAG audit and teach you how to understand the results and maintain compliance over time. 

Let’s jump into it! 

Before diving into the nuts and bolts of a WCAG audit, you’ll need to understand what your site will be measured against. WCAG defines three levels of conformance, and each builds upon the previous one:

Ideally, you’ll aim for at least WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance. This is the standard requirement for businesses under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

For European businesses, it’s a bit more nuanced. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) doesn’t directly require WCAG conformance. Instead, it points to the harmonised standard EN301549, which then references WCAG guidelines.

So what does this mean for you? While WCAG isn’t technically mandatory under the EAA, it’s still your best bet for achieving accessibility and testing whether your site meets the requirements. Think of it as the unofficial gold standard – following WCAG 2.1 Level AA will help you tick all the right boxes for both American and European regulations. 

The newer WCAG 2.2 version adds a few more criteria but follows the same structure.

🤔 Wondering if there’s a big difference between ADA standards and WCAG requirements? Read all about it in our piece on WCAG vs ADA!

Some example objectives of a proper WCAG audit include:

Running a thorough accessibility audit isn’t something you can knock out in an afternoon. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have their own evaluation methodology called WCAG-EM (WCAG Evaluation Methodology), which provides a structured approach for assessing websites.

While you might be tempted to run a WCAG audit yourself, the most reliable approach is to hire professional auditors with accessibility expertise. However, understanding what the WCAG-EM process involves helps you prepare effectively and make the most of professional services. Let’s explore what happens before, during, and after a proper WCAG audit.

Before the professionals step in, there’s plenty you can do to get ready:

Remember: WCAG-EM also requires including randomly selected pages in your sample, with the exact number depending on your site’s size.

When accessibility experts start work, they’ll typically start with automated testing to provide a solid baseline. They would use tools like WAVE, aXe, or SiteImprove to scan your templates and find common accessibility issues like missing alt text or heading structure problems. However, these findings will be documented as a starting point only because automated tools only catch about 30–40% of accessibility issues, and we can’t count on them alone. 

Here’s a perfect example: An automated tool might flag that a button lacks a proper name, but it won’t catch when developers use a <span> instead of a proper <button> element. This is actually a much bigger problem – keyboard and screen reader users won’t be able to interact with it at all!

This is why experts then move on to manual testing, which includes: 

The audit scope you defined earlier determines exactly what gets tested. If your site includes PDFs, complex data tables, carousels, or mobile-specific interactions, these all become part of the standard testing process – not some optional extra. Every feature within your defined scope gets the full accessibility treatment. 

While they’re working, expert auditors create detailed reports that will describe:

Congrats! Your audit is complete, and now the real work can begin. The obvious first step is to implement the recommended fixes, but that’s not the end of it. After that, you need to perform validation testing so you can make sure you’ve not created more problems than you’ve solved. This usually includes retesting each resolved issue, verifying that your fixes didn’t create more problems, documenting the improvements, and finally updating the accessibility documentation. 

If you’ve been successful, you can continue business as usual with the added step of ongoing monitoring. Accessibility is a journey, not a destination, so an audit is just the first step. 

This journey might look different for each company, but generally, monitoring means:  

When it comes to accessibility audits, you have two choices: doing it yourself and hiring professionals. The former is obviously the more budget-friendly option, but only in the short term. While in-house testing has its place, professional WCAG audits offer distinct advantages that are hard to match.

First, professional audits are typically conducted by specialists who combine both manual and automated testing methods. These experts use validated tools and techniques to put your website against WCAG success criteria. They’re also equipped to handle projects of any size or complexity and can work within your timeline constraints.

However, and perhaps most importantly, expert auditors can spot issues that automated tools simply miss. For example, an automated scanner might verify that your form fields have labels, but only a human tester can determine if those labels actually make sense to users. Similarly, tools can check if alt text exists for images but can’t evaluate whether that text meaningfully describes the image or provides equivalent information.

Professional auditors also stay current with evolving accessibility standards, keeping you ahead of regulatory changes. Their comprehensive reports include not just what’s wrong, but practical, actionable steps to fix each issue with clear timelines for implementation.

For example, they’re aware of all the common mistakes companies make when they attempt in-house audits:

Still, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing your in-house team can do to improve accessibility; it’s just that they would have different responsibilities. Ideally, they can handle day-to-day monitoring and maintenance, while professional audits will serve as crucial validation points – similar to how companies use external financial auditors alongside internal accounting teams.

The audit offered by The A11Y Collective is based on WCAG Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) and delivered by IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals)-certified specialists who understand both technical requirements and user needs.

Here is what it includes: 

The final deliverable is an actionable report including:

Our standard timeline is four weeks from kickoff to final report, though this can be adjusted based on your site’s complexity or urgent needs.

At €5000, our professional audit represents excellent value compared to the potential cost of litigation – which can easily run into tens of thousands of euros even for straightforward cases.

As you can now understand, ensuring your website meets accessibility standards is becoming increasingly important for many reasons: legal compliance, user satisfaction, and your organisation’s reputation. While understanding the audit process is a great start and will help you prepare, it’s still not enough to conduct a proper WCAG assessment, as it requires specialised expertise and tools that many teams simply don’t have.

 The key takeaways from this guide highlight the comprehensive nature of proper accessibility testing: automated tools catch only 30–40% of issues, manual testing requires specialised knowledge, and maintaining compliance is an ongoing process rather than a one-time fix.

The A11Y Collective brings proven expertise to this challenge. Having trained thousands of professionals in web accessibility, our team has unique insight into the common obstacles organisations face and how to overcome them with practical, implementable solutions.

Don’t leave your accessibility compliance to chance – book your expert-led WCAG audit today!