What We Keep Finding
A news site is one template wearing a thousand stories. When the article template ships an unlabeled share bar or a related-stories block that reads before the story does, that failure repeats on every piece you have ever published and every piece you publish tomorrow. Nothing else on the web multiplies quite like it, which is also the good news, because the fix multiplies at exactly the same rate.
Around the story sit the machines. The paywall dialog, the video player, the ad slots that shove the page mid-read. Two of those have a right answer that costs less than the workaround. A paywall built on the browser's own dialog element gets focus handling, the Escape key and the inert background for free, and the custom version teams write instead is where the focus traps come from. A player that needs a key combination to release focus is allowed to need one, as long as it tells the user which key. Silence is what fails, not the key combination.
Then the captions, and here the failure is almost never the missing ones. It is the automatic ones. W3C is blunt about it. Auto-generated captions do not meet accessibility requirements unless somebody has confirmed they are accurate, and they usually need real editing first. The standard they have to reach is the dialogue either word for word or in essence, plus the sounds that carry meaning. On a news desk publishing 40 clips a week, that is a workflow question rather than a bug, and it is better to find that out from an audit than from a complaint.
What We Check
- Read full articles by screen reader on each of your core templates
- Test paywall and sign-in dialogs for focus that goes in, comes out, and says so
- Check the video player's captions control by what it announces, not what it shows
- Watch how ad slots and pop-ins disturb reading order and hide the focused element
- Verify headlines, bylines, and section navigation read in a sensible order
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 one threshold worth knowing before you read the report. The limit is the archive. We audit your templates and a sample of live stories rather than every story you have ever run. The template fixes reach the archive on their own, and a hand-built interactive from 2019 needs a pass of its own. The threshold is about ads and overlays. The Level AA rule is that the focused element must not be entirely hidden, so an ad that partly covers a focused link passes. We hold to that line rather than padding the report with findings that would not survive a second opinion.
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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