Get deep, human insights into your product

Get a precise snapshot of how your service measures up to WCAG with careful, human consideration and advice.

Key benefits

Deep, specialist testing
Our team combines software engineering skills, lived experience of disability and a deep knowledge of the technical standards.
Platform-independent
Testing looks at web sites, apps and other digital services from the user perspective. We’ll work with you to find the most relevant requirements and standards applicable to your service.
Legally reassuring
Getting an independent view on your progress can be a good way to double-check your progress and direction. We can also provide a high-level summary of our findings for management or lawyers who are following your progress.
Reporting by humans, for technical professionals
Every issue that requires attention will be written up, including specific suggestions to address issues in design or code.

What is WCAG?

The vast majority of assessments of web sites, online stores, web services and mobile apps test against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These are technical standards covering many of the issues which create barriers to disabled users. The criteria can be tested objectively (with a little room for small interpretive differences between professionals) and the results can be explained to a designer or software developer.

Other standards exist, too, but WCAG is widely used in Europe (it is referenced by the European Accessibility Act) and beyond (for example when enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act in the US, the public sector accessibility regulations in the UK and more).

If you’re not sure which standards apply to your service, talk to us, and we’d be happy to share some insights.

Watch out

Sometimes, teams buy an audit, receive a report, then get overwhelmed by a long list of issues, which end up sitting in a backlog for months or years while they create friction for real disabled people trying to use your service. This kind of testing can give you a good insight into where you are now, but, usually, it is helpful to approach this work in a more agile way, progressively improving while new features get delivered. Check our maintenance plans for more options that might suit your team better.

How it works

Tell us about your service and what you know about your users. With an accessibility specialist, you will discuss your legal requirements and what you’re actually aiming for, and propose an assessment plan. This can be a meeting, or by email, let us know what works for you.
If this looks good, let us know and leave it with us. We can test your production service or a test deployment, just tell us what works for you. This is usually remote, asynchronous work, but we’ll let you know when we expect to be done.
We’ll share a report detailing criterion-by-criterion what we found. If something didn’t meet the standards, we’ll suggest a fix. Depending on your preferences, we can include videos demonstrating issues and create a spreadsheet of issues, ready to import to Jira.
If you wish, we can retest things that your team fixes, support addressing specific challenging issues, or regularly meet with the team to coach them through the fixes. If everything looks good, we can discuss whether to revisit this process later, or whether to consider a maintenance plan.

Get started

Tell us about what you offer your customers, what you’re aiming for and what you’ve done so far. We’ll get back to you with a recommendation and a price as soon as we can.

Why “assessments”?

A lot of companies refer to accessibility auditing. This is an accurate description of what happens - careful, methodical testing against specific, narrow criteria. We reject the culture where accessibility is treated as a check-box activity to satisfy lawyers, so we also avoid choosing words which reinforce this idea.

What we call assessments are very similar to what other accessibility consultancy providers often package as audits, just without the feel of “you should only do this to keep the lawyers away.”