Digital accessibility is the umbrella term. It covers every digital thing your organisation puts in front of a person, whether that person is a customer, a citizen, or an employee.
Most owners meet the idea through their website, discover the term later, and then find out the scope is wider than the thing they just fixed. Better to know the shape of it up front.
The Seven Things It Covers
| What | The standard that applies | Where it usually breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Websites and web apps | WCAG 2.2 AA | Keyboard traps, contrast, unlabelled forms |
| Mobile apps | WCAG 2.2 AA, read for native platforms | Touch targets, missing labels, custom controls |
| PDFs and documents | WCAG plus PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) | No tags, scanned text, no reading order |
| WCAG, applied as best the format allows | Image-only campaigns, poor contrast, no alt text | |
| Video and audio | WCAG 1.2 criteria | No captions, no transcript, no audio description |
| Kiosks and hardware | EN 301 549, Section 508 | Touch-only interfaces, no audio output |
| Internal software | Section 508, EN 301 549, employment law | Bought without asking, so staff cannot use it |
The Part Organisations Forget
Two of those rows catch people out repeatedly.
Documents. A site can pass every check while the price list, the menu, and the annual report hanging off it are untagged PDFs. The law does not care about file format. Our PDF accessibility guide covers what makes a document readable, and our free PDF checker will tell you where yours stands in about ten seconds.
Internal software. Accessibility is usually framed as a customer question, which quietly excludes your own staff. If your HR portal, your rota tool, or your ticketing system cannot be used by a screen reader, you have made a hiring decision without meaning to. This is where a supplier's VPAT earns its keep: ask for one before you buy, not after somebody cannot do their job.
Web Accessibility vs. Digital Accessibility
The terms get used interchangeably and they are not the same size.
- Web accessibility is websites and web applications. Standard: WCAG.
- Digital accessibility is everything above. Standards: WCAG for anything with a user interface, plus PDF/UA for documents and EN 301 549 or Section 508 for procurement.
- Accessibility, unqualified, usually includes the physical world too: buildings, doors, parking, signage. Different laws, different specialists, not our field.
We work on the digital side, and the majority of that work is web and documents.
Where to Start
In this order, because each step makes the next one cheaper:
- Start with the website, because it is the highest-traffic thing you own and the most likely to draw a complaint. Our free scan gives you the mechanical picture in minutes.
- Then the documents people actually download. Price lists, forms, menus, reports. Not the whole archive, the ones with traffic.
- Then the mobile app, if you have one, since it is usually a separate codebase with separate problems.
- Then procurement. Start asking vendors for a VPAT before you sign. This is the cheapest step and it stops the problem renewing itself.
- Then internal tools, working backwards from whatever your staff use most.
One honest limit
We audit websites, web applications, and documents. We do not test native mobile apps or hardware kiosks, and we would rather say so than take the work and wing it. If that is what you need, ask us and we will point you somewhere that does it properly.