Fully Manual WCAG Audits Necessary for Accessibility and Compliance

Kris explains why WCAG accessibility audits must be 100% manual with no exceptions. If a service provider claims their audit includes automation, they're not offering a real audit. What you're paying for is a technical accessibility expert conducting a thorough, meticulous evaluation of your digital asset against a WCAG standard, not copied-and-pasted scan results you could get for free right now.

Automated scans only reliably detect 13% of WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria. They can't provide the conclusive findings needed for ADA compliance, VPAT completion, or certification. A real audit uses diverse evaluation methodologies including screen reader testing, keyboard testing, color contrast analysis, visual inspection, code inspection, and more to uncover every instance of non-conformance.

The marketplace confusion exists because accessibility companies purposefully blur the lines between scans and audits in their marketing. They promote "combined approaches" of automated and manual testing, but that's not how audits work. An audit is never a combination—it's fully manual from start to finish. Scans can serve as a second layer after the audit to catch any human error, but they should never be the primary source of finding issues.

Working toward a 100% scan score is the wrong objective. Your goal is full WCAG conformance, which only a manual audit can verify. No law, regulation, settlement mandate, or procurement request asks for perfect scan results — they all demand WCAG conformance, and that requires a legitimate accessibility audit.

Read the referenced article, "Fully Manual Accessibility Audits are King":

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Contact Kris about your accessibility audit:

https://accessible.org/contact

#WebAccessibility #DigitalAccessibility #WebsiteAccessibility