A WCAG-EM Evaluation, for When the Contract Names the Method

What We Keep Finding

Some requirements do not ask whether your site was audited. They name the method. WCAG-EM is W3C's Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology, a five-step procedure for evaluating a website against WCAG, and a reviewer who cites it expects to see its structure back in what you hand over. It is a W3C Group Note, which makes it guidance rather than a standard your site can conform to, and that distinction is worth holding on to when a contract names it as though it were one.

The method's real work is in how the sample gets drawn, because sampling is where an evaluation usually goes soft. Our standard audit lets you pick the pages that matter most, which is the right shape when the goal is to improve a site. WCAG-EM takes that choice away on purpose. You build a structured sample of common pages, essential tasks and complete processes, then add a random set at 10% of that size. And you write down how you picked it, so somebody else can judge whether the sample flattered you. Then you compare the two sets, because a random slice that fails harder than the chosen one tells you the chosen one was chosen well.

It also asks for two things a normal audit report leaves out, and they are the two a reviewer looks for first. The accessibility support baseline, meaning which browsers and assistive technologies your users actually run and what you are therefore entitled to rely on. And the list of web content technologies the pages depend on. Neither is hard to establish once somebody asks the question, and skipping them is the usual reason a report gets sent back.