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Careers Accessibility Audit: Can Every Candidate Apply?
For the employer who wants the application flow to work for every qualified candidate, including the ones whose first contact with the company is an unlabeled upload button.
What We Keep Finding
A careers page that fails assistive technology is filtering candidates before a human reads a single resume, and nobody in the building can see it happening. The usual suspects are application forms spread across unlabeled steps, resume-upload controls a keyboard cannot reach, and third-party applicant systems bought without an accessibility question asked.
The upload is worth being precise about, because auditors get it wrong in a way that costs you. An upload control a keyboard cannot reach fails the keyboard rule at Level A, which is the serious end of the scale. It is not a failure of the newer rule about dragging. No W3C example for that rule is a file drop zone, because the drag there starts in your operating system rather than in the page. Same finding, right rule, and it matters when somebody is prioritizing a backlog by severity.
One rule applies to almost every application flow and gets skipped almost every time. If your form asks again for details the candidate already gave when creating an account, the site has to fill those in or offer them for selection. That is Level A, the strictest tier. And the browser doing it for them does not count, because the standard wants the site to supply the answer rather than the browser.
If you are a public body, the argument is simpler and much stronger. Your careers page is government web content, so the Justice Department's rule reaches it directly at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The dates are April 26, 2027 for entities whose population is 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for everyone smaller. A federal agency is covered separately by Section 508. Those are dated regulations rather than inferences, and they are the version to put in front of a budget holder.
What We Check
- Apply for a real job end to end with a screen reader
- Test the resume upload by keyboard, which is a Level A failure when it cannot be reached
- Check multi-step application forms for labels, progress, and errors
- Measure against 3.3.7, so the form never re-asks for what the account already holds
- Verify search and filters on the listings page work by ear
- Audit your applicant-system embed and separate its vendor findings
What You Get
Every service on this site runs the same three-pass engine: an automated scan, an expert review of all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a hands-on session with a professional blind screen-reader user. You get one report with every finding screenshotted, ranked by user impact, and linked to its fix. Your team fixes, we verify: the re-audit is half price within 3 months.
The format is not a mystery either. Read the sample report before you spend anything.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit, and it has a cost you should price in. Applicant tracking systems are third-party fortresses. Your listings and your embedding get direct fixes. The system's own screens get precise, dated evidence your procurement team can put in front of the vendor, and no more than that. There is one more thing you can do while procurement works, and it comes from the standard rather than from us. Monitor the tracking system's screens and repair what breaks within two business days, and your claim survives. Or publish that the page would conform if those screens were removed, described so an applicant can tell which part is meant. All of which is worth knowing when you pick pages. A listings page, a job detail page and a three-step application is five of a Rapid Audit's 10 before the vendor's screens are counted, and those are the ones you cannot act on directly.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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