The majority of our clients want documentation of their accessibility efforts – whether it’s Accessible.org certification, a conformance statement, and/or a VPAT/ACR. And understandably so, it’s demonstrable evidence of WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, compliance, and/or another objective.
An accessibility audit is necessary for certification for a few reasons:
- We need to first identify all of the accessibility issues.
- We need to validate that issues identified have been fixed.
- An audit is necessary to show that identification and validation have taken place.
The validation phase of this is basically a re-audit where the auditor is only focused on the issues that have previously been identified.
So the simple answer to how an accessibility audit leads to your website (or other digital asset) being certified is that an audit tells us your website meets all requirements under a given technical standard.
Although VPATs aren’t certification, they’re like a cousin to certification and many clients need an Accessibility Conformance Report or ACR (the completed VPAT) to win contracts – or even be in contention for purchase.
What a lot of clients like is our pause phase after the audit.
We can audit your asset, deliver the report to you, and work with you through remediation and validate the issues. This enables you to have a cleaner VPAT/ACR (if not fully conformant) when you present it to purchasers.
The alternative being that you purchase VPAT services and simply get an ACR that reflects the state of your digital asset’s accessibility as it is pre-fix.
Software
We’ve been promoting our new Accessibility Tracker as the fisherman’s catch of the day for the last month or so.
Tracker does a lot of things, but what’s relevant here is it makes tracking your team’s remediation progress easier. There’s a column you can check to mark each issue as complete.
But what it also does – and here’s the kicker – is it also enables your auditor to mark issue as validated / fixed correctly. If it’s not fixed correctly, the auditor can leave a note and tell you what else needs to happen.
And you don’t have to be an Accessible.org client to get this mega hours time saving feature.
If you’ve been through an accessibility project where two or more people are collaborating, there’s a lot of back-and-forth which can be highly inefficient for multiple reasons, one being that people aren’t on the same page.
Tracker was deliberately designed by us to be a centralized hub where the focus is solely on the audit and everyone is literally on the same page.
Which, of course, leads to certification faster.
AccessibilityTracker.com if you’d like to find out more. Officially for sale on March 15, 2025.
