Accessibility Audit Services
A thorough ADA compliance evaluation of your website, mobile application, software, or other digital experience, with actionable results, and ongoing support.
Why a Web or Mobile App Accessibility Audit?
Ensuring your digital content is accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities, is a key drive for business success. Not only is an accessible website or app a legal mandate required by laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), European Accessibility Act (EAA), Section 508, and others, an experience that’s usable for everyone expands your consumer base—and ultimately your profitability.
A website accessibility audit is an evaluation of how well your website, or other digital experience, meets globally recognized web accessibility standards—the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Any issues not meeting the standards are flagged, prioritized based on severity, and results are delivered back to you.
But not all web accessibility audit services are created equally, and not all results are as actionable as Allyant’s.
Manual Testing Built on Automation
Allyant’s web accessibility audits leverage our powerful, proprietary automated scanning tool, combined with expert evaluation and live testing conducted by legally blind engineers. We start by creating a streamlined testing plan based on your organizational objectives, and then we get to work.
An automated scan will flag common accessibility errors. But each experience is then manually evaluated by an accessibility engineer who’s IAAP certified in the WCAG standards. After automated and manual evaluation, we add a third layer of review conducted by a native assistive technology (AT) user. User testing ensures we’ve flagged any issue that may be compromising functional usability.
The result of this three-tiered testing plan is a thorough, comprehensive evaluation, equipping you with the information you need to prioritize the work ahead.
It Starts with Design
The best time to audit and identify accessibility errors is in the design phase—before launching a digital product or website. A design audit prevents errors from making their way through each stage of the development lifecycle, ultimately causing re-work at the end.
Our digital accessibility Design Review process is simple—send us your low- or high-fidelity prototypes, mock-ups, or wireframes, and our team of accessible design experts conducts an assessment. Once our review is complete, we don’t just deliver to you a marked-up file. We go through that review live, with your team of designers and developers, identifying and explaining each issue, where it’s found, why it’s problematic, and how to fix it. We share best-practices documentation and an accessibility design checklist.
This interactive working session supports real-time Q and A custom to your designs and your level of expertise. And our team can interact where yours is—whether Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision, or other tools.
Request a Design Review
Third-Party Integration
We want accessibility work to weave seamlessly into your existing workflows. Our platform integration with Jira allows you to push accessibility findings into your project management system, seamlessly connecting communication for your teams to ensure the work is captured, prioritized, and completed.
Simple, Seamless Accessibility Audits with Allyant
The journey to accessibility and compliance begins with a comprehensive website, mobile app, or software accessibility audit. Leverage Allyant’s decades of experience and expertise, coupled with our top-tier tech, to evaluate your current state of compliance, and partner with you to create a plan for long-term success.
Request an AuditFrequently Asked Questions
At its core, a web accessibility audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a website or application’s accessibility features or conformance with the WCAG Guidelines.
The primary purpose is to identify elements that might hinder the user experience for people with disabilities. This includes individuals with a broad range of disabilities, including visual impairments such as blindness or color blindness, hearing impairments, motor disabilities such as ALS or Cerebral Palsy, and cognitive disabilities such as Autism or ADHD– among many others.
To learn more about web or mobile app accessibility audits, read our article: What is a Web Accessibility Audit?
The Web Content Accessibility Standards, or WCAG, are the internationally recognized standards for web accessibility. WCAG has evolved over the years, with standards specific to versions 1.0, 2.0, and now 2.2. Each version of WCAG also has standards specific to a certain level of conformance—A, AA, and AAA, with AAA being the highest possible level of conformance.
A web accessibility audit evaluates a website—or other digital property—against the most applicable version and level of the WCAG standards.
To better understand the different version and levels of WCAG, read our blog: From WCAG 2.0 to 2.2: Why AA Conformance is the Optimal Accessibility Goal.
The accessibility of a website is assessed using the WCAG standards. WCAG has become the globally accepted set of accessibility standards and is often the criteria by which legal compliance is measured. Many laws go so far as to identify a version of WCAG required for compliance.
Comprehensive web accessibility audit services evaluate your website, mobile app, or other digital experience against the WCAG standards, surfacing any issues that fail to meet them.
The cost of a web accessibility audit varies based on your organization’s needs. Cost is often determined by testing methods, the number of templates or components that form the foundation of your website or application, the number of core user paths that are critical to your experience, the complexity of your website or app, and other considerations.
For a more in-depth read on the cost of an audit, access our blog The Cost of Digital Accessibility: A Comprehensive Guide for Organizations.
A mobile application accessibility audit follows many of the same principles of a website accessibility audit, including following the principles of the WCAG standards. However, while WCAG provides the foundation for mobile application accessibility auditing, evaluating apps involves an additional expertise—functional testing conducted by people with disabilities. This layer of testing is important when auditing any digital experience, but it’s especially important because mobile applications often rely on gestures like pinching, swiping, tapping, and dragging, utilize custom controls, and have unique navigation paradigms that WCAG doesn’t full address.
To better understand how Allyant conducts mobile application accessibility auditing, read our blog Mobile Application Accessibility: Understanding WCAG Conformance and Legal Requirements for Your Native Applications.
An accessibility design review is a comprehensive examination of your website, app, or other digital product design files to check for accessibility issues before your website or product moves to the code stage. When design files are reviewed for accessibility, and accessibility issues are corrected, it prevents those issues from making their way further through the development process, creating re-work later in the cycle.
At Allyant, design reviews are much more than transactional file sharing. Our team conducts hands-on working sessions with your team—including designers and developers—pointing out accessibility issues that should be addressed, the barriers they would create for the user, guidance to fix issues, and alternative options if there is no accessible solution.
A design review or audit is not a requirement, but it is a best practice. If accessibility issues are caught and corrected in the design phase, those issues do not get passed to the development team causing costly re-work that may ultimately delay your website or product launch. Correcting accessibility issues earlier in the creative process will also help reduce your organization’s legal risk—ensuring that website or product does not launch with non-compliant accessibility errors.
For more about the value of shifting accessibility earlier in the creative process, read our blog How to Shift Left in Digital Accessibility: A Guide to Building an Designing Inclusively from the Start.
Color contrast is the difference in color between an element in the foreground and an element in the background. For example, the difference in color between a font placed on top of an image or its background.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) stipulate specific color contrast ratios to ensure color is legible, and readable, for all users—especially those with visual impairments. If the contrast in your design does not meet certain ratios, the design will not pass WCAG accessibility standards.
Common accessibility issues include:
- Improper semantic structure, such as incorrect heading hierarchies.
- Insufficient color contrast between text and background.
- Missing or non-descriptive alt text for images.
- Unlabeled or mislabelled interactive elements like buttons and links.
- Inaccessible forms lacking proper labels and instructions.
To learn more about design tips for accessibility, read our blog 5 Graphic Design Tips for Creating an Accessible Website.
