AI’s future in the digital accessibility marketplace is hybrid automation, with efficiency being the hallmark of new products and services. Not only is this the future, it’s the present.
Our integrated AI inside Accessibility Tracker has already made it easier for teams to fix audit issues, saving time and money. In the future, this trend will only continue as Accessible.org and other digital accessibility companies incorporate artificial intelligence to reduce costs and save time.
| Process Layer | How It Works in Practice |
|---|---|
| Layer 1: AI Scanning | AI-powered “super scans” automatically evaluate digital assets for accessibility issues. By 2026-2027, these scans will reliably detect approximately 70% of WCAG success criteria with 98% accuracy, significantly outperforming current automated tools. |
| Layer 2: Human Review | Accessibility experts thoroughly review all AI-generated results to verify accuracy, catch false positives, and ensure the automated findings are correctly interpreted within the specific context of your digital asset. |
| Layer 3: Manual Supplementation | Humans evaluate the remaining 30% of success criteria that AI cannot yet reliably assess, such as complex interactions, contextual appropriateness, and nuanced user experience considerations that require human judgment. |
| Layer 4: Completed Output | The AI findings with human review and human evaluations are combined into a comprehensive accessibility audit report that provides complete WCAG 2.1 AA or 2.2 AA conformance assessment, ready for remediation. |
What is Hybrid Automation?
Hybrid automation in accessibility is where we can automate some or all of a process through AI or coded rulesets, but the resulting output must be thoroughly reviewed and/or supplemented manually before the output is able to be used in a commercial or professional setting.
Let’s use the most popular accessibility service to illustrate how hybrid automation will work.
Hybrid Accessibility Audits
Currently automated scans with or without AI are not good enough to rely upon the results. We still need an accessibility audit (which is fully manual) to reliably account for all WCAG success criteria and identify all of the accessibility issues on a digital asset.
Effectively this means that we can disregard scans when seeking to make our digital assets fully WCAG 2.1 AA or WCAG 2.2 AA conformant. For most buyers in the digital accessibility market who are concerned with compliance, use of a scan or a scan-based platform only delays the inevitable need for an audit.
Scans are of most value to practitioners who understand their limitations.
However, in 2026 and 2027 we will see the rise of super scans: AI accessibility scans that significantly detect more issues with a much higher rate of accuracy. As these scans become more capable and more intelligent, they will become reliable to the point that they will actually be preferred over humans for finding certain accessibility issues.
For example, once the beta versions of these scans pass through, in 2026, we might reach a point where 70% of WCAG success are evaluated by AI scans with a 98% accuracy rate.
When this is the case, we’ll see the hybrid component of the audits come into play: humans will review the 70% results and then evaluate for the remaining 30% of success criteria just as the currently evaluate for the 100% of WCAG success criteria.
Again, why hybrid, we will see a human review and/or supplementation layer to the process.
So we won’t see 100% automated automation, but we will move significantly closer to it.
And if the workload for Accessible.org goes down by, let’s just say 70% for simplicity sake, then our accessibility audit prices also go down by 70%. What was once a $1,000 accessibility audit is now $300 and what was once a 10-day turnaround is now a 3-day turnaround.
This type of application and efficiency can be expected in multiple other activities within accessibility, from remediation documentation to documentation.
Efficiency Future
This is the future of AI in digital accessibility products and services: efficiency.
Manual services like audits and remediation take a lot less time, cost a lot less money, and finish much, much faster.
AI has already impacted the digital accessibility marketplace in a major way and that impact will scale efficiency even more in 2026 and 2027.
