An accessibility audit is a structured review of a product to find where it fails people with disabilities, usually measured against WCAG. It mixes automated scans, manual testing, and assistive-tech checks, and ends in a prioritized list of issues to fix.
Use cases
Skip the audit and you find your barriers the expensive way: through a complaint or a lost deal.
Beating a legal deadline: A team runs an audit ahead of an ADA or European Accessibility Act deadline so they fix issues before a lawsuit finds them first.
Passing procurement: An enterprise buyer won't sign without an accessibility report or VPAT. No audit, no contract.
Inheriting a codebase: Before a redesign, an audit shows the real state of an old product instead of the team guessing what's broken.
How it's used in practice
Scope it first: Pick the key flows and page templates, not every URL. One audited checkout flow beats a shallow scan of 500 pages.
Run automated scans: Use axe, WAVE, or Lighthouse to clear the easy, code-level issues quickly so manual time goes to the hard ones.
Test by hand: Walk each flow with a keyboard only, a screen reader, 200% zoom, and a contrast check. This is where the real problems surface.
Log issues with severity: Record each one against its WCAG criterion, rank by user impact, and attach a concrete fix and an owner.
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Pro-tip: An audit that dumps 400 raw violations gets ignored. Group issues by root cause (one broken component often explains 50 errors), rank by user impact and frequency (a dead checkout button beats a faint footer link), and tie each to a real fix. A ranked, actionable report ships. A scanner export gets shelved.
Challenges & limitations
Tools catch only part of it: Automated scans find a fraction of issues, so a "clean" scan can still be unusable. Manual testing is not optional.
It's a snapshot: An audit captures one moment. Without re-testing, new code quietly reintroduces the same problems.
It needs real expertise: Without assistive-tech skill and lived-experience input, teams produce thin audits that miss what actually blocks people.
