A WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility audit of your website or web application, built for Ontario's AODA: automated scans, expert manual review, assistive-technology testing, and a findings report your developers can act on and your procurement officer can file.
What you get, and what you do not
You get a list of every barrier a person with a disability would meet on your site, ranked by how much it costs them, each with a fix. You get it in two forms: the technical appendix a developer works from, and the summary a director signs. What you do not get is a score. A site is not 87% accessible; a person either completes the journey or does not, and the report is organized around the journeys.
We audit against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which contains the WCAG 2.0 AA criteria Ontario’s regulation names and adds the criteria for mobile, low vision and cognition that any current site needs. WCAG 2.2 criteria are reported separately, marked, so the report stays useful when the law catches up.
Why an audit from a firm that builds
Most audits are written by people who test. Ours are written by people who also build — the developers who will fix what they find if you ask them to, and who therefore write fixes that work rather than fixes that are technically correct. It is also why the report is honest about effort: a missing label is a five-minute fix; a colour system that fails contrast everywhere is a design decision, and we say which is which.
The audit is the first step of a practice that runs through remediation, document remediation, conformance reporting and continuous monitoring. You can stop after any step. Most organizations that start with an audit before a compliance-report deadline end up with a plan that carries them past the one after it.
What an audit covers
Every success criterion, tested the way a person with a disability meets your site
Automated scanning
Every page of the site crawled by ACHECKS, with Lighthouse scoring alongside. Automation finds roughly a third of the barriers; it finds them on every page, which is what makes it the right first pass.
Expert manual review
The two-thirds automation cannot see: keyboard operation, focus order, meaningful names, colour used as the only signal, forms and errors, motion, timing. Reviewed by people who build accessible sites, against WCAG 2.1 AA with 2.2 flagged.
Assistive-technology testing
Screen readers (NVDA, VoiceOver), keyboard only, zoom to 400%, high contrast and reduced motion — the journeys that matter, walked end to end.
Documents on the site
The PDFs your pages link to are part of the site in law and in practice. We sample them and tell you which need remediation.
Findings ranked by harm
Every issue with the page, the element, the criterion, a screenshot, and a fix — ordered by the impact on a real person, not the volume of the scan.
Two readers, one report
A technical appendix your developers work from, and a plain-language summary a director can sign. The same facts, written for the person reading them.
How an audit runs
Scope
A short call and a crawl. We agree the templates, the key journeys (enquiry, application, checkout, login), and the documents in scope, then quote a fixed fee.
Test
Automated pass, manual review, assistive-technology sessions. Two to four weeks depending on size; you see findings as they land, not at the end.
Report
The findings report and a walkthrough with your team. Where a fix is a one-liner, it is in the report; where it is a redesign, we say so.
Fix, or hand off
Most clients ask us to remediate what we found. If your team does the work, we re-test what they fixed and issue the conformance statement.
Who commissions an audit
Organizations with a compliance report due
The next AODA compliance report for businesses and non-profits is due 31 December 2026. An audit is how you answer the web questions truthfully — and what you file if the answer is not yet.
Public-sector and broader public-sector bodies
Ministries, agencies, municipalities, hospitals, boards and post-secondary institutions, who need findings written for a procurement file as much as for a developer. We are an Ontario Vendor of Record.
Teams about to redesign
An audit before a redesign turns the obligation into requirements. It is the cheapest accessibility work you will ever buy.
Vendors being asked for a VPAT
A buyer wants an Accessibility Conformance Report for your product. The audit is the evidence behind it; the conformance report is the deliverable.
Questions we're asked
Which standard do you audit against — WCAG 2.0, 2.1 or 2.2?
Ontario’s regulation names WCAG 2.0 Level AA, excluding live captions and pre-recorded audio description. We test to WCAG 2.1 AA, which contains 2.0 in full and adds the mobile, low-vision and cognitive criteria a modern site needs, and we flag the WCAG 2.2 criteria separately so you can see what the next revision of the law is likely to ask for. You get one report that answers the legal question and the practical one.
Is an automated scan enough?
No. Automated tools reliably detect about a third of WCAG failures — missing alternative text, contrast, structure — and cannot judge whether a name is meaningful, a keyboard journey is possible, or an error message helps. Automation is the right first pass over every page; the audit is the manual and assistive-technology work on top of it.
How long does an audit take, and what does it cost?
Two to four weeks for a typical corporate or public-sector site; longer for applications with many authenticated journeys. We quote a fixed fee after a short scoping call and a crawl of the site. What drives the price is templates and journeys, not page count — a thousand pages on eight templates audits faster than fifty bespoke ones. We have written up what an AODA website audit costs in Ontario.
Can the audit report be filed with our compliance report?
The compliance report asks whether your website meets the standard; it does not ask for evidence. The audit report is what supports a truthful answer, what you show a regulator or a complainant if asked, and what your board sees. It is written with that reader in mind.
Do you audit web applications and intranets?
Applications, yes — authenticated journeys are where the hardest barriers live. Intranets are exempt from the website requirement in Ontario, but many organizations audit them anyway because their own employees use them; we audit them the same way.