If you've started researching accessibility audit services, you already know your website needs to be more inclusive—and likely more compliant. But what does a proper audit actually involve, and how do you know if you're getting real value?
This post breaks down exactly what professional accessibility audit services should deliver, and why a surface-level automated scan simply isn't enough.
What a Real Accessibility Audit Covers
A credible audit is not a single report generated by a browser plugin. It is a structured, multi-layer review of your entire digital product. Here is what a thorough audit includes:
1. Automated Scanning (The Starting Point, Not the Finish Line)
Professional accessibility audit services start with automated tools like axe-core, Lighthouse, or WAVE. These catch about 30% of WCAG violations—things like missing alt text, insufficient colour contrast ratios, and absent form labels. This is the floor, not the ceiling.
2. Manual Keyboard Navigation Testing
A trained auditor navigates your entire site using only a keyboard—no mouse. This reveals broken tab orders, focus traps inside modals and dropdowns, missing skip-navigation links, and interactive components that simply don't respond to the Enter or Space key. These issues are invisible to automated tools and are among the most common causes of AODA complaints.
3. Screen Reader Testing
Using industry-standard screen readers—NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS and iOS—an auditor listens to how your site is announced to users with visual impairments. Common failures include unlabelled buttons announced as "button, button, button," decorative images that are mistakenly read aloud, and ARIA attributes that are applied incorrectly, creating confusion rather than clarity.
4. Cognitive and Content Review
Accessibility isn't only about assistive technology. A quality audit checks whether your content is plain-language, whether error messages are descriptive and helpful, and whether your information architecture is logical for users with cognitive disabilities. WCAG 2.2 Guideline 3.3 (Input Assistance) makes this a formal requirement.
5. A Prioritized, Developer-Ready Remediation Roadmap
The most important deliverable is not a list of problems—it is a prioritized action plan. A professional audit categorizes findings as Critical (blocks access entirely), High (significantly degrades experience), Medium, or Low, and provides the specific code fix for each issue. Your development team should be able to open the report and start fixing immediately.
What WCAG Level Should Your Site Meet?
For most Canadian businesses operating under AODA, the minimum standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. However, if your organization serves the public sector, financial services, or healthcare, reaching WCAG 2.2 Level AA is rapidly becoming the expected benchmark and protects you against future regulatory updates.
How Often Should You Conduct an Accessibility Audit?
- At minimum, schedule a full audit:
- When you launch or relaunch a website
- When significant new features or pages are added
- Annually, to catch regression introduced during ongoing development
Many organizations pair annual audits with quarterly automated CI/CD checks integrated into their development pipeline.
Why Accessibility Audit Services Pay for Themselves
The ROI is straightforward. Canadians with disabilities represent over $55 billion in combined purchasing power. An inaccessible checkout flow or broken contact form is not just a compliance risk—it is direct revenue loss. Beyond revenue, a formal audit report is your evidence of due diligence if an AODA complaint or human rights tribunal case is ever filed against your organization.
At EqualAudit, our accessibility audit services combine automated scanning, manual keyboard and screen reader testing, and a developer-ready remediation report—all mapped against WCAG 2.2 Level AA and Ontario's AODA requirements.
👉 Ready to see exactly where your site stands? Visit equalaudit.com to get started.