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An Onboarding Audit Listens to Your First Impression
For the SaaS team that polished its first-run experience and wants that first impression to land for users on assistive technology too.
What We Keep Finding
Onboarding is where products are most animated and least accessible. Coach marks that point at things a screen reader cannot correlate. Tooltips that appear on hover only. Tours that hijack focus, cannot be skipped by keyboard, and mark themselves complete whether or not the user ever perceived them.
The correlation problem is the real one, and it has a specific cause. A coach mark's connection to the control it describes is positional, and position is not something a screen reader can convey. So the fix is to wire the description to the control programmatically, and to make sure any instruction that leans on position also says the thing in words. The rule there bars relying on position alone rather than banning the cue, so "the Save button at the top right" is fine and "the button at the top right" is not.
A coach mark is also not a modal, and treating it as one breaks it. A tour step that dims the page and blocks everything can reasonably hold focus. A coach mark pointing at a live control must not, because the user has to be able to reach the control being pointed at. W3C is direct about this, saying focus constraint can leave keyboard users worse off than mouse users and should be used cautiously. So the question is which of the two you built, and the tests follow from there.
One thing we will say plainly rather than bury. A tour that marks itself complete for somebody who never perceived it is a real product failure with no rule behind it. WCAG says in its own introduction that even top-level conformance will not reach everyone with cognitive and learning disabilities, and this is one of those places. So it lands in your report as a usability observation, labelled as one, rather than dressed up as a conformance finding. The user who fights through a hostile first run rarely files a bug. They just decide the product is not for them, five minutes in.
What We Check
- Run the first-time experience with a screen reader, start to finish
- Ask whether each tour step is modal, because holding focus is right for one and wrong for the other
- Check coach marks are wired to the control they describe, not just pointing at it
- Check tooltips and hints work by keyboard, not just hover
- Verify skipping the tour is reachable by keyboard and leaves the product fully usable
- Separate the conformance findings from the usability ones, and label which is which
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 request. Onboarding keys off fresh accounts and first-run flags, so we need a way to reset that state for testing, and we ask for it by email once the scope is confirmed. Any variant we could not trigger gets named in the report rather than assumed fine. This is also the one journey the free scan cannot touch even slightly. A first-run experience needs a new authenticated account, and the scanner cannot create one or sign into one, so it would look at your marketing page instead.
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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