Services - Website Audits

The Problem We Address

Whether forced by a judicial complaint or simply taking the initiative to make an existing online presence useful to all stakeholders, organizations are grappling with how to approach a problem that seems complex and expensive.

Our Solution

Access2online's approach is to make a client's accessibility solution affordable, not just to save money but also to produce a solution that is simple, clearly compliant, and quick to rollout. We keep in mind that the objective is to put on your website a certification seal and a link to a Letter of Reasonable Accessibility signed by Trusted Testers certified by the Office of Accessible Systems and technology, and we achieve that objective by improving the online experience of the disabled visitor to your website.

Our first step in an audit is often to help you determine what needs to be audited. For a large archival website, this is an important question and as our webinars and write-up show, we are the industry's experts regarding the W3C's methodology to accomplish this.

The next step is to follow an objective, structured, thorough methodology to uncover the accessibility violations according to the standard appropriate for your situation, for example, WCAG 2.1 to a Level AA rating or Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Our deliverable is a spreadsheet with a worksheet for each web page, each of those with a row detailing the specific test condition mapped to the line item of the standard being validated. We use a collection of over 2 dozen software tools as part of this process, but the key is always an experienced analyst who understands the tool's report, particularly the many warnings that can be a violation or not.

As useful as that violation list is, that doesn't tell your webmaster what to do about them, and that is often as far as other analysts go. Access2online does better. We collect those violations into a Summary of Webmaster's Accessibility Remediation (SWAR), a clear Microsoft Word document written for your web designer in maintenance mode. Each violation is converted into one or more suggestions to remediate the violation without requiring the webmaster to know our accessibility specialty, only HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and standard web development — always with an eye to leaving unchanged the website's functionality and the aesthetics for the sighted visitor. High-value remediation, such as headers and footers in the templates of a Content Management System (CMS), come first since they affect many pages. This SWAR may be considered a simple to-do list that reduces an entire website remediation into a small number of person-days, particularly if the web designer takes advantage of our free and unlimited debriefings to go over the SWAR, often with the web designer making the remediation as we go down the SWAR's list.

In the common situation that an audit is part of an Accessibility Plan, which we can help produce, we integrate the audit into a process that may require staff training and support. Our solution is to recognize that accessibility is not so much a destination as a process, a process that our clients can count on us to help navigate.

To provide an idea of what to expect, here are some samples of our work with fictitious clients:

How to Get Started

We have three quick ways to get started, all using our contact options.

  1. Use the Signup form to open a free account to use our cloud-based task management system called eTaskBoard® to propose and manage your task orders (aka work authorizations) at our affordable $49/hr labor rate. Because of the efficiency you'll find there, we can respond to a task as small as to audit a single web page — an excellent way to check us out with a real deliverable in your hands.
  2. Use the Request a Proposal form to tell us about your requirements, the scope of work to be done, and the standards to be applied. We can help you define any of that. We will respond with a fixed-price, fixed-schedule proposal for your project.
  3. Call us or email us at any of the addresses on our contact page. Sometimes a conversation is the way to go.

How to Select an Accessibility Expert When You Are Not an Accessibility Expert Yourself


We've all been the victim of the silver-tongued salesman. At least for the near future, accessibility is different. The market is larger than the veterans like Access2online try to handle, and so we compete in a rather collegial atmosphere, primarily because we are united in our mission to make the internet accessible to all.

To support that process, we suggest you use a comparison table we developed to make sense of the decision before you. Its left-hand column lists the evaluation factors we think are important to consider. Cross out the ones unimportant to your situation, and add to the top the ones we neglected that are important for you.

This comparison table is easy to print and travels well to meetings and phone calls.