Why Accessibility Evaluations Are Worth the Trouble

Most of the accessibility problems I find are not controversial. They are not edge cases, they are not matters of opinion, and they are almost never expensive to fix. They are things like a form field with no label, a contrast ratio that fails by a tenth of a point, or a heading structure that jumps from H1 to H4 because someone liked how the smaller size looked. The people who built the site were not careless. They just never had anyone check.

That is what an accessibility evaluation is. Someone checks, writes down what they find, and tells you how to fix it. It is unglamorous work and I think it is some of the most valuable work I do.

What an evaluation actually produces

An evaluation is not a pass or fail grade. It is a document that turns a vague worry into a specific list of tasks your developer can work through.

• A review against WCAG 2.2 AA, which is the standard nearly every policy and procurement requirement points to.
• Automated scanning, because it catches missing alt text and contrast failures in seconds.
• Manual testing, because automated tools cannot tell you whether your tab order makes sense or your link text means anything out of context.
• Findings ranked by severity, so you fix what blocks people before you fix what annoys them.
• Remediation guidance tied to each issue, written so the person doing the work knows what to change.
• An executive summary for the people who need to understand the risk without reading the technical detail.

The ranking matters more than people expect. A report with sixty undifferentiated issues gets filed and forgotten. A report that says these four things prevent people from completing your checkout, and these fifty-six are cleanup, gets acted on.

Why automated tools are not enough

Automated testing is genuinely useful and I run it on every evaluation. But it can only verify what a machine can measure. It will tell you an image has no alt attribute. It cannot tell you that the alt text on your hero image says “image1.jpg” or describes a decorative graphic in forty words a screen reader user has to sit through.

The published estimates vary, but automated tools reliably catch only a minority of WCAG failures. The rest require someone to navigate the site with a keyboard, listen to it with a screen reader, and ask whether the experience actually works. That is the part people skip, and it is the part that determines whether your site is usable.

The business case, plainly

I am not going to tell you accessibility is purely a moral issue, because in my experience that argument rarely moves a budget on its own. Here is the practical version.

• Roughly one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability. Some of them are your customers, and some of them left your site because they could not use it.
• Web accessibility lawsuits and demand letters have become routine, and they usually target the same handful of failures an evaluation would have caught.
• If you sell to a school district, a hospital, a state agency, or a large employer, accessibility conformance is increasingly a procurement requirement. No documentation, no contract.
• The same structural fixes that help assistive technology also help search engines. Proper headings, real labels, and descriptive links are good for both.
• Fixing an issue during a redesign costs a fraction of retrofitting it two years later across two hundred pages.

When to get one

The best time is before a redesign goes live, while changes are still cheap. The second best time is now. If you are mid-project, an evaluation gives your developer a punch list before launch instead of a surprise after. If your site has been up for years, it gives you a baseline and a plan rather than a vague sense that you should probably look into it.

I have done this work for a hospital system evaluating enterprise testing tools and for a university reviewing its campus platforms, and the pattern is the same at every scale. The findings are rarely dramatic. The value is in having them written down, prioritized, and handed to someone who can act on them.

What I do

An accessibility evaluation from us starts at $750 and covers a site or a document reviewed against WCAG 2.2 AA, with every finding tied to the specific criterion it fails and a plain-language explanation of the fix. You get the technical detail your developer needs and the summary your director needs, in one document.

Accessibility evaluations are one part of our broader technical writing and documentation work. If you are not sure whether you need a full evaluation, tell me what you are working with and I will tell you honestly. Sometimes the answer is a two-hour review and a short list. You can reach me through the site or at (507) 384-8958.