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A PWA Audit for App Behaviour Under Web Rules
For the team whose site installs, works offline, and behaves like an app, and wants it audited like the app it has become.
What We Keep Finding
A PWA promises app behavior, and assistive technology holds it to that promise. Installed mode strips the browser chrome your users leaned on, so your own navigation is suddenly carrying everything. Offline states swap content silently. Update prompts and permission asks arrive as focus-stealing surprises if nobody designed their manners. Whether any of that happens depends on one line in your manifest, since standalone and fullscreen take the chrome away and the other display modes leave it.
It is still the web underneath, which is genuinely good news. The standard defines a web page as a resource fetched from a URI, and that is what your app is however app-like it feels, so the same rules apply and the same fixes work. There is no separate PWA standard to learn. What there is instead is a set of states your users spend real time in and nobody ever tests.
Update prompts are the one worth getting right first, because the obvious fix and the second obvious fix cancel each other out. If the prompt takes focus, that is already a change of context and the user knows it arrived. Adding a live region on top announces it twice. And if you build the prompt on the browser's own dialog element you get focus in, tab containment, Escape, an inert background, and focus returned on close, without writing any of it.
What We Check
- Test installed standalone mode, where the browser fallbacks your app was leaning on disappear
- Check offline and reconnect states for whether the change is announced at all
- Audit update prompts and permission asks for focus manners, and for announcing twice
- Run the app-style navigation patterns by keyboard and by screen reader
- Verify the ordinary web rules still hold in every display mode your manifest allows
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 costs you something specific on this page rather than in general. Our testing is desktop-based, which is true of everything we sell, and it bites hardest here because a PWA's whole point is installing on a phone. The standard treats every layout your page presents as its own page that has to conform on its own, so a desktop evaluation cannot settle how your app behaves on a narrow screen. Most findings we raise will be true at both widths. The ones that only appear on a phone are outside what we looked at, and phone platforms also set their own touch-target minimums that are stricter than the web rule. Native-wrapper store builds are a different animal again, and we do not audit those yet.
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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