By role · Business owners
The Decisions Only You Can Make
Most of accessibility belongs to somebody else. Five parts of it land on your desk, and nobody else can settle them for you.
You decide whether accessibility gets funded, which standard binds the business, and who answers for it when it slips.
Five decisions land with the owner in most companies. Whether to fund the work. Which standard the business commits to. Who is answerable once the first round of fixes has landed. What goes into the contract when you hire an agency or buy software. And whether the site makes a public accessibility claim, because the moment it does, that claim is a promise a stranger can check. Everything after those five, the alt text and the testing and the code, belongs to a named person somewhere else on the team. How your team splits the rest is yours to decide. What matters is that each job has a name against it.
None of it asks you to become a specialist. It asks you to make five calls well. The failure here is almost never bad work. It is five people each quietly assuming somebody else has this one.
What you own
- Whether this gets funded, and how much.
- Which standard the business commits to meeting, and by when. Where a law already names a version, the decision in front of you is whether to go further, not which one applies.
- Who is answerable for it once the first round of fixes has landed.
- What goes into the contract when you hire an agency or buy software.
- Whether the site makes a public accessibility claim, and whether that claim is true. A conformance logo counts as a claim under the standard, and a claim carries five things. The date. The guidelines by title and version, with the link to them. The level met. A description of the pages covered, saying whether subdomains are in. And the technologies the content relies on. A vendor's accessibility widget dropping its own badge in your footer is a different animal, and whether it amounts to a conformance claim depends on what the badge actually says.
What is not yours
The implementation, the testing and the day-to-day publishing. What is yours is making sure each of those has a name against it. If you cannot say today who owns keyboard testing, then nobody owns it. In our own audits, an unowned job is the one we come back to a second time.
Where to start, in order
- Where to startYour first month in order, including the thing not to buy until you have decided what you are aiming at.
- Which laws apply to youYour jurisdiction sets your deadline and the standard you are held to, and those two answers differ from country to country.
- What an audit costsTwo quotes for the same word can describe completely different work. This is how to tell which one you are reading.
- Gap analysis, audit or conformance evaluationThree depths, three different documents at the end, and no industry definition of any of the three words. What to ask a supplier so you are comparing the same thing twice.
- How many pages an audit needsFill this in before you ask anyone for a price. It turns a vague enquiry into a scope two suppliers can quote against the same way.
- What to get ready before an auditAn afternoon of writing things down and one decision about access. The access is what delays almost every engagement.
- Six myths that cost moneyThe six beliefs owners act on that send the budget somewhere it does nothing.
- What a free scan cannot seeRead this before you treat any green result as an answer, including ours. A clean scan is a floor and never a verdict.
- Why overlays do not workBefore a vendor sells you a one-line fix, read what happened in 2025 to sites that already had one running. UsableNet counted 1,416 US digital accessibility lawsuits filed that year against companies with a widget on the site. That is a count of lawsuits rather than of companies.
- Writing it into a brief or contractWording a supplier can actually be held to, rather than wording that only sounds firm in a kickoff meeting.
- A customer asked for a VPATThe triage that turns an open-ended demand into a scoped piece of work, before anybody promises a date.
- Answering an accessibility questionnaireWhich evidence answers which question, and the sentence to write for the rows you have not tested yet.
- The roadmap when you do not conform yetOwners and retest gates instead of dates you cannot keep, and why a plan is never a conformance claim.
- Keeping it after the fixesThe routines that stop you paying for the same body of work a second time.
- What a usable report containsThe eight things every finding needs, so you can tell whether the audit you paid for was written by somebody who knew what they were doing.
- How to read the report you paid forA real report annotated line by line. What the header settles, whose severity those chips carry, and why a summary line is not a conformance result.
- Retest or new auditThe decision after the fixes land, in four questions about what changed. One of the answers is that you should not buy anything yet.
The mistakes we see most from this role
Not a criticism. These are the failures that recur across audits, and knowing them is most of avoiding them.
- Buying an overlay because it arrived first and cost the least. A script can repair an individual defect. What it cannot do is establish that your site conforms, or keep a claim off your desk.
- Reading a clean automated scan as proof the site passes, when by our own count a machine fully settles only 10 of the 356 WCAG techniques and failures we graded, and hands the rest to a person.
- Claiming conformance you have not tested for. Publishing a statement early is fine and some laws require it, as long as it says plainly what is not fixed yet and how to reach you about it.
- Waiting for the next redesign, which then ships with the original problems plus whatever the rebuild introduced on top.
- Funding one audit and nothing after it. Ordinary publishing puts new content on top of the fixes, which is how a repaired site drifts back.
- Leaving nobody accountable, which is how this turns into an emergency instead of routine work.
Tools you will use
Other roles
Find out what your site actually needs.
The free scan checks 10 pages in a real browser against all 90 supported automated rules, keeps its 27 best-practice checks separate from WCAG findings, and names the rule behind every finding.