Accessibility Audits

If your website was built by a volunteer, a well-meaning contractor, or someone on staff who figured it out as they went, there’s a good chance it has accessibility problems. If you’re not thinking about accessibility at all - and let’s be honest, that’s probably the case - there’s a good chance it has a lot of them.

The usual paths to discovering those issues are not great: a complaint from a community member, a question from a funder during a grant review, or a demand letter from a law firm. Getting out ahead of it is almost always easier and cheaper than responding to it.

An accessibility audit walks through your site the way someone using a screen reader, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology actually would. We identify what’s broken, explain why it matters in plain language, and give you a prioritized list of what to fix— not a wall of compliance citations, but clear findings tied to real users and real consequences.

Why it matters

Ideally, this is straightforward: if your organization exists to serve a community, your website should work for everyone in that community, including people who use assistive technology. But there a few more reasons to care about this than just “it’s the right thing to do”:

• For nonprofits that receive federal funding, Section 508 compliance is a legal requirement.
• ADA Title III has been applied to websites in a growing number of court cases, and small nonprofits have been targeted by demand letters.
• Accessibility improvements almost always improve SEO and mobile usability at the same time.
• For many organizations, a significant portion of your community has a disability. Your site should work for them.

Accessibility tends to get treated as a checkbox—something you do to avoid legal trouble, usually at the end of a project when it’s expensive to fix. That framing misses the real point. Most accessibility problems are design and content problems that make the site worse for everyone, not just users relying on assistive technology.

What we look at that tools miss

Automated tools are a starting point, not a finish line. A real audit includes manual testing—keyboard navigation from start to finish, screen reader walkthrough, form and interactive element review—alongside automated scanning.

We look at the things tools reliably miss:

• Whether your heading structure actually communicates the page’s organization or is just being used for styling
• Whether form fields have real labels (placeholder text doesn’t count—it disappears when users start typing)
• Whether you can complete every interactive task on the site without a mouse
• Whether color contrast holds up for users with low vision
• Whether images have meaningful alt text or are just tagged with the filename

You get a written report with findings explained in plain language, prioritized by impact, and tied to specific pages and elements. No overwhelming spreadsheet of every WCAG criterion—just what you need to know and what to do about it.

Starting fresh vs. fixing what you have

If you’re not ready to rebuild your site right now, an audit is often the right starting point: you learn what you’re actually dealing with before deciding how to invest in fixing it. Some issues are quick wins. Others point to deeper structural problems worth addressing in a more deliberate way. If you’re not sure whether the site is worth fixing at all, we’ve written about that decision.

If you’re building something new with us, accessibility is designed in from the start rather than bolted on at the end. That’s almost always cheaper and produces better results.

Either way, we’re happy to talk through your situation before you commit to anything. The free 20-minute evaluation below is a reasonable place to start.