Insights

What a real accessibility audit looks like

Plainsight Compliance · Kansas City, MO · July 2026

Anyone can sell you a PDF with a scary score on the cover. Before you pay for an accessibility audit — ours included — you should know what a legitimate one contains.

Five things to demand from any audit

1. Element-level findings. “Your site has contrast issues” is not a finding; it’s a horoscope. A real finding names the exact element, the page it lives on, the WCAG criterion it fails, and what a user experiences when they hit it.

2. Evidence of manual testing. Automated tools catch only a fraction of the barriers that matter — they cannot tell you whether your checkout can be completed with a keyboard, or whether your form errors are announced to a screen reader. If a vendor’s methodology section doesn’t mention specific assistive technology — VoiceOver, NVDA, keyboard-only passes — you are buying a software printout with a markup.

3. A remediation plan your developers can execute. Findings without fixes just transfer anxiety. Each item should come with code-level guidance and a severity order, so your team knows what to fix first and why.

4. A re-test. The engagement isn’t done when the report is delivered; it’s done when the fixes are confirmed. A vendor with confidence in their findings will verify your remediation and update your score.

5. Honesty about limits. No audit makes you lawsuit-proof, and no honest vendor claims otherwise. What conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA does is remove the barriers complaints are built on — which is both the legal point and the customer-experience point.

Why we publish ours

Talk is cheap, so we put a real assessment on the internet: our published audit of zinger.io — score, findings, remediation path, exactly as a client receives it. And we hold our own website to the same standard: every page of this site is tested against WCAG 2.1 AA, and the current score is published on our accessibility statement.

If you want to see what your own site looks like through this lens, the preliminary assessment is free, and a person — not an autoresponder — reviews every one.