Before You Hire an Accessibility Provider, Read This

Not everyone offering accessibility services is acting in good faith or delivering quality work.

Hiring the wrong provider can lead to:

• legal problems,
• wasting a lot of money on poor work,
• paying for fake or useless solutions like accessibility overlays,
• and not helping disabled people enough or not at all.

Accessibility vs. Legal Compliance

If you care about making your website genuinely accessible for disabled people, remember that WCAG compliance alone is not always enough. A website can pass WCAG checks while still being hard to use for real people. That’s why you should test a website with real disabled people.

If your main goal is legal compliance, make sure to:

• check your local laws,
• talk to a lawyer if needed,
• and understand which standards apply in your country or industry.

Important Things to Know About Accessibility

1. Automated tools catch only some problems

Automated accessibility tools are useful, but they cannot find everything. Many problems can only be found through manual testing like:

• keyboard testing,
• screen reader testing,
• and getting real human feedback.

2. Accessibility is not a one-time task

One audit or one round of fixes will not keep your website accessible forever. New content, updates, plugins, or redesigns can create new accessibility problems.

3. Accessibility overlays are often a bad solution

Some companies sell accessibility overlays that claim to instantly fix accessibility issues.

In many cases, they do not fix the website. Sometimes they even make things worse and create additional barriers for disabled users.

Avoid providers that push overlays as their main solution.

4. WCAG compliance doesn’t always mean good accessibility

Passing WCAG checks doesn’t guarantee a good user experience, it’s a good starting point. People with disabilities are not a monolith, so may have needs that are beyond the WCAG rules. They can’t possibly address everyone’s needs.

Quick Tests You Can Make Yourself

A simple way to judge an accessibility provider is to look at:

• their own website,
• or websites they say they worked on.

Keyboard Test

You need to be on your desktop computer for this one. Open the site and use only Tab, Enter, and arrows keys to navigate through the page.

• Press Tab to move forward through all clickable elements.
• Press Shift+Tab to move backward.
• Press Enter or Space on buttons and checkboxes to activate items.
• Use the arrow keys for menus, dropdowns, and carousels.

You should be able to tell where you currently are, each focused element should be clearly highlighted. (Focus is where the keyboard is currently "on" — the item that will act if you press the Enter.) You must be able to get everywhere without getting stuck.

If you can't tell what is currently focused, then people relying on keyboard instead of a mouse can't either.

200% Zoom Test

Go to your browser or device settings and increase the font size to 200%. Or select a value that is higher than your current one. Then browse the site. Is it broken or the font size stayed the same? They didn’t think of accessibility.

Automated Accessibility Test

Copy the website’s link and insert it into a Wave Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. You’ll see the list of issues the page contains. If the provider’s own website has many obvious accessibility problems, you should be on guard or rather stay away from them.

Keep in mind that websites may have few accessibility errors simply because:

• accessibility work takes time,
• site owner had a limited budget to cover all the issues,
• or some issues are planned to be fixed later.

Good and Bad Practices

Green Flags

Good accessibility providers usually:

• understand both WCAG rules and real usability,
• explain problems clearly,
• focus on the most important issues first,
• work well with developers and designers,
• do manual testing, not only automated scans,
• test with assistive technologies,
• involve disabled users in testing,
• have experience with your type of website,
• and help fix problems instead of only listing them.

Red Flags

Be careful if a provider:

• promises 100% compliance,
• sells accessibility overlays as the main solution,
• tries to scare you with lawsuits or legal threats,
• relies only on automated tools,
• cannot clearly explain how they test,
• sells AI-powered accessibility solutions,
• offers audits that are unrealistically cheap or fast,
• gives long list of accessibility problems without priorities,
• or doesn’t warn you about accessibility being more than a one-time thing certification.

Summary

Accessibility is about helping real people use your website. If something sounds too easy, too fast, or too good to be true, it probably is.