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Home Blog How to Conduct a Thorough Digital Accessibility Audit
Did you know that just 3% of the web is considered to be truly accessible? – AudioEye
September 2, 2025
This isn’t acceptable, and something has to change.
Whether you operate a global e-commerce platform, run a customer service center, or publish digital content, ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities is simply a non-negotiable baseline.
And yet, many companies remain unprepared.
The good news?
A comprehensive digital accessibility audit is the first, most powerful step you can take.
This guide will walk you through the audit process step by step. Let’s make your digital experience accessible to everyone, starting now.
In a 2025 review of one million home pages, 94.8% of them had WCAG 2 failures.
Every audit starts with knowing what you’re assessing. Digital accessibility extends far beyond a website homepage. To meet modern compliance requirements and user expectations, you need to cast a wide net. This step lays the groundwork for your entire accessibility strategy.
Think broadly:
Pro Tip: Be sure to evaluate your customer service experience end-to-end. Tools like Be My Eyes’ Customer Accessibility Suite — including Service AI (automated visual interpretation) and Service Connect (video support with real agents) enable organizations to deliver seamless accessible support experiences for blind and low-vision customers.
Once you’ve defined what needs auditing, the next step is understanding what “accessible” really means. Standards vary by region, but for websites at least, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the globally recognized baseline. Benchmarking against these guidelines ensures your audit is both comprehensive and compliant.
WCAG covers four key principles:
Pro Tip: Aligning with WCAG 2.1 AA (or 2.2 when finalized) will put you in a strong position for EAA, ADA and global compliance.
Referencing these standards provides your team with a clear target and shared language for remediation.
There is no single tool that can do it all. A strong digital accessibility audit combines multiple testing methods to surface issues that are technical, experiential, and contextual. This multi-method approach ensures that both functional access and usability are covered.
Use the following approaches:
Pro Tip: Partner with real communities to get authentic user testing from disabled individuals.
Using a combination of tools and real users ensures you catch both the obvious and the overlooked.
An audit is only useful if it leads to action.
“Accessibility isn’t achieved by intention alone, it’s achieved by structure, ownership, and follow-through. If we want lasting change, we have to turn findings into frameworks that everyone can act on.” — Hans Jørgen Wiberg, Founder, Be My Eyes
This step is where you translate insights into a roadmap by documenting findings in a structured, digestible format. Clear categorization helps teams triage issues effectively and focus on what matters most.
Organize your findings:
Pro Tip: Include screenshots, user quotes, or screen reader logs to bring issues to life and build empathy across teams.
A well-documented audit turns accessibility from a checklist into a shared accountability framework.
Knowing what’s broken is just the beginning.
Now it’s time to fix it.
This step focuses on making accessibility a cross-functional effort, integrating remediation work into your product and content pipelines.
Steps to take:
Pro Tip: Start with reusable components (like buttons and forms) to create a scalable impact across your digital footprint.
Accessibility must be treated as a product quality issue, not a feature request.
Fixing issues is important, but confirming that they’re truly resolved is critical. Retesting ensures that changes are effective and don’t introduce new accessibility barriers. It also builds trust with users and stakeholders.
Make sure to:
Pro Tip: Don’t just test for pass/fail, test for usability. Invite users with disabilities to complete key tasks post-remediation and ask where friction remains.
Validation helps shift accessibility from a static checklist to an active part of quality assurance.
Accessibility should always be viewed as an ongoing process and not just a one-time fix.
“The most impactful companies treat accessibility as a principle. Building a roadmap means making accessibility part of how you design, deliver, and lead, every single day.” — Mike Buckley, CEO, Be My Eyes
This final step is about embedding accessibility into the culture and operations of your organization. Think of your roadmap as a living strategy.
Include the following:
Pro Tip: Include accessibility KPIs in product OKRs, and tie improvements to user satisfaction and compliance goals.
Sustainable accessibility means moving from reactive fixes to proactive inclusion.
Your accessibility audit is only as effective as the tools and support you bring to it.
From automated scanners to community-based testing platforms, there’s a growing ecosystem designed to help teams catch issues early, fix them fast, and build inclusively from the ground up. Use a combination of these to cover technical checks, manual experience validation, and real-user feedback.
Pro Tip: Build your internal accessibility toolkit into onboarding and training so every designer, developer, and content creator knows how to use these tools.
An accessibility audit isn’t just a risk mitigation exercise. It’s a bold signal that your organization is ready to serve every customer, employee, and partner equally.
You’ll unlock new markets. You’ll reduce legal risk. You’ll design better products for everyone.
And most importantly, you’ll contribute to building a digital world that reflects the diversity of the real one.
The opportunity is here. Let’s make good business accessible, together.
Want to discover how accessibility fuels innovation, reduces risk, and opens the door to entirely new markets? Download our eBook and learn why accessibility is simply good business.
