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Cookie Banner Audit: The First Barrier on Every Site
For the site whose consent banner greets literally every visitor, and which would rather that greeting not be the day's first accessibility failure.
What We Keep Finding
The consent banner is the one interface every single visitor must operate, and it is routinely the worst-built thing on the page. Banners that never receive focus at all, so a screen reader user browses an overlaid page they cannot fully use and cannot dismiss. Reject buttons rendered as low-contrast ghosts of Accept. Preference panels that open into unlabeled toggle soup.
Focus holding is the question people get backwards, and both wrong answers are common. A banner that holds focus is correct if it is a modal, and a native dialog opened with showModal() does that for you. A banner that holds focus without being one is the failure. W3C names three conforming shapes for a sticky notice, and only one of them holds focus. Make it modal, use scroll padding so it never overlaps the focused control, or close it when focus leaves. Pick one and hold the banner to that pattern's rules.
Here is the argument that should decide your budget, and it is the standard's rather than ours. Conformance is judged on a full page, and a banner appears on every page you own. So one broken banner is not one finding. It is a failure of every page it appears on, which makes it simultaneously the smallest fix and the widest one on your site. It is also the cheapest thing you will ever add to an audit, because whichever pages you pick, the banner is on them.
One correction that saves an unnecessary rebuild. The Level AA rule here asks that a focused control not be *entirely* hidden. A banner covering half of the field you just tabbed to passes. The rule requiring no covering at all is Level AAA, and a report that quotes the AAA requirement under the AA number is asking you to pay for something you do not owe.
What We Check
- Meet the banner with a screen reader, as every visitor does
- Operate every choice by keyboard, so accept, reject and preferences alike
- Decide whether it is modal, then hold it to that pattern's rules
- Check no focused control ends up entirely hidden behind it
- Verify reject is as perceivable as accept, and test the toggles for names and states
- Check any exit needing an unusual key says so, since a banner that closes on Escape has to announce that
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 a note about our own free scan for once being useful. Consent platforms ship their own widgets, and their internals belong to them, so your configuration options get direct fixes and the platform's own failures get evidence sharp enough to escalate. On the scan, this is the one journey it can partly reach, because a banner sits in the initial state of every page. It will measure your ghost-button contrast and catch an unlabeled toggle. What it cannot do is tab anywhere or open your preferences panel, which is where most of the findings live.
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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Guides, checklists, tools, and terms that go with this service.