WCAG 2.2 Accessibility
Web Accessibility Services - WCAG Conformance and Genuinely Better Products
Our web accessibility services include WCAG 2.2 audits with prioritized, developer-ready remediation guidance, accessible-by-design delivery from the first wireframe, and team training so your people ship accessibly by default. Accessibility is simultaneously a legal obligation, a large market, and a quality standard that improves the experience for everyone.
Our Services
Roughly one in six people worldwide lives with a significant disability. That's a market most digital products serve badly - and increasingly, a legal exposure: the ADA in the United States, the European Accessibility Act (with obligations applying from June 2025), and public-sector regulations in many jurisdictions all point to WCAG as the reference standard. But the compliance framing undersells it. Accessible products are better products: clearer structure, better contrast, keyboard efficiency, readable language. The captions built for deaf users get watched on mute by everyone else.
WCAG 2.2 Audits
Manual expert testing with assistive technology - screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, zoom and reflow - combined with automated scanning. Automated tools catch only a minority of accessibility issues; the rest require human judgment, which is why a scanner report is a starting point, not an audit.
Developer-Ready Remediation
Each finding includes the affected element, the criterion it fails, why it matters for real users, and the specific fix. Severity-prioritized by user impact, not by tool severity score.
Accessible-by-Design Delivery
We design and annotate for accessibility from the first wireframe: focus order, semantic structure, contrast, error handling, and component behavior. Designing accessibly costs a fraction of retrofitting - retrofit projects routinely cost multiples of doing it right the first time.
Accessibility Statements & Documentation
Conformance statements and VPAT/ACR support where procurement or regulation requires them.
Team Enablement
Training for designers, developers, and content authors, plus checklists integrated into your definition of done - so conformance holds after we leave rather than decaying with the next release.
The Overlooked Benefit
Accessible markup is structurally clean markup: proper heading hierarchy, labeled controls, meaningful alt text, semantic HTML. That is precisely what search engines parse for ranking and what AI systems parse for citation. Accessibility work and findability work are largely the same work wearing different badges - an argument that tends to unlock budget where the ethical and legal ones haven't.
What Manual Testing Finds That Scanners Cannot
Automated tools are useful and limited. They reliably catch missing alt attributes, insufficient color contrast, missing form labels, and invalid ARIA. They cannot evaluate whether anything actually works. Only manual testing with assistive technology finds:
Alt text that exists but is meaningless. "image1.jpg" passes an automated check and tells a screen reader user nothing.
Illogical focus order. Every element reachable, in an order that makes the page incomprehensible.
Keyboard traps. A modal you can enter and cannot leave without a mouse.
Unannounced dynamic changes. Content updates that a sighted user sees and a screen reader user never learns about.
Custom components with wrong semantics. A div styled as a button, technically labeled, behaving like neither.
Instructions relying on sensory characteristics. "Click the green button on the right."
Flows that are technically conformant and practically unusable. The most important category, and entirely invisible to tooling.
Published research consistently puts automated detection at around a third of accessibility issues. A scanner report is where an audit starts, not what an audit is - which is also why compliance overlays that promise instant conformance have been widely criticized by disability advocates and have not reliably prevented litigation.
Do you know where you stand on WCAG?
Manual and automated testing against WCAG 2.2, with a prioritized remediation plan your developers can start on immediately.
WCAG 2.2, Briefly
WCAG 2.2 added criteria that matter disproportionately for real users, and that many otherwise-conformant sites fail:
Focus not obscured. The focused element must be visible - commonly broken by sticky headers and cookie banners covering the element a keyboard user just tabbed to.
Dragging movements. Any drag interaction needs a single-pointer alternative, affecting sortable lists, sliders, and drag-and-drop uploads.
Target size. Interactive targets need adequate size or spacing, which is where dense mobile interfaces most often fail.
Consistent help. Support mechanisms appear in a consistent location across pages.
Redundant entry. Don't ask users to re-enter information they've already provided in the same process.
Accessible authentication. No cognitive function test - such as remembering a puzzle or transcribing characters - without an alternative.
Building a Program Rather Than Passing an Audit
An audit is a snapshot; conformance decays with every release unless it's part of how you work. What sustains it:
Definition of done includes accessibility. Keyboard operability, contrast, semantics, and labels checked before a ticket closes.
Automated checks in CI to catch the mechanical regressions cheaply.
Component-level accessibility. Get it right once in the design system and every future feature inherits it. This is the highest-leverage accessibility investment available to any product team.
Author training, because content authors introduce most new issues after launch - heading misuse, uninformative link text, missing alt text, and inaccessible uploaded PDFs.
Periodic manual review on key journeys, because automation only covers a third.
Frequently Asked Questions
Automated tools detect roughly a third of accessibility issues. They cannot judge whether alt text is meaningful, whether focus order makes sense, whether dynamic updates are announced, or whether a flow is genuinely usable with a screen reader - all of which require manual testing with assistive technology.
Focus not obscured by sticky headers or banners, single-pointer alternatives to dragging, adequate target size and spacing, consistently located help, no redundant re-entry of information, and authentication that doesn't require a cognitive function test without an alternative.
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international standard for accessible digital content, published by the W3C. Conformance is measured at level A, AA, or AAA; AA is the level referenced by most legislation and procurement requirements, and the practical target for most organizations.
In many jurisdictions and contexts, yes. The ADA is applied to websites in US case law and Department of Justice guidance; the European Accessibility Act applies to a broad range of products and services in the EU with obligations from June 2025; and public-sector accessibility regulations exist across the EU, UK, Canada, and Australia. Requirements vary by sector and jurisdiction - worth confirming your specific obligations with counsel.
No. Automated scanners detect only a portion of accessibility barriers - commonly cited research puts it at roughly a third - and cannot evaluate things like meaningful alt text, logical focus order, or whether a flow is genuinely usable with a screen reader. Overlay widgets that promise instant compliance have been widely criticized by disability advocates and have not prevented litigation.
Two to four weeks for a representative sample of templates and key user journeys on a typical site. Remediation timelines depend on findings volume and code structure, and we phase them by user impact.
Far less if designed in than retrofitted. Retrofitting an inaccessible product routinely costs several times what accessible design would have - which is the strongest argument for including it in every new build rather than treating it as a compliance project.
Yes, indirectly but genuinely. Semantic structure, descriptive headings, alt text, and clear language all improve how engines and AI systems understand your content - and no accessibility fix has ever hurt a ranking.