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Accessibility audit readiness checker

Audits go slowly for boring reasons. Nobody could reach the signed-in pages, the build changed under the tester, the findings landed the week before launch. Ten questions about the things you arrange in advance, including the access ones, which are the ones that take longest and get left last.

Never type a credential here. There is no text field anywhere on this page, deliberately. Whether you have a test account is a yes or no question, and the account itself travels by whatever private route you and your evaluator agree.

1 of 10Is there a build an auditor can reach that will hold still while they work?

Findings are recorded against what was on screen. A deploy halfway through the week turns half the evidence into a description of something that no longer exists.

2 of 10Is it the build a real user would get, rather than a trial or a demo instance?

A trial build can be missing features, and results from it are about the trial. Federal buyers who test before award ask for the real release for this reason.

3 of 10For anything behind a sign-in, is there a test account, and an agreed private way to hand it over?

Signed-in pages are in the sample list for every audit worth buying, and they are the part most often skipped because nobody sorted access out in time.

4 of 10Can the testing happen without touching real customer or staff records?

An auditor working through a journey leaves a trail: orders, messages, bookings, support tickets. On real records that is somebody's actual data.

5 of 10Have you decided which user journeys matter most?

A page inside a process only conforms if every page in that process does, so journeys are the unit the answer attaches to. A page count is not.

6 of 10Have you agreed which browsers, systems and assistive technologies count?

WCAG names no combinations, so the evaluator sets a baseline with you before testing. Leave it unset and two competent audits can disagree with no way to reconcile them.

7 of 10Have you decided the target level?

Almost every law that names WCAG names Level AA. AAA is a real answer for specific content and W3C advises against it as a policy for a whole site.

8 of 10Do you know who will read the report, and in what form?

A report for a developer and a report for a director are different documents. A supplier who has not been told will guess, and you will get the guess.

9 of 10Is there time to act on the findings before your next deadline?

An audit delivered the week before a launch is a document, not a change. GOV.UK's own advice is not to leave it until the last minute.

10 of 10Do you know which parts were built or supplied by somebody else?

It changes what can be investigated and who fixes what. It also changes what you can promise afterwards, because a widget's roadmap is not yours.

What is still open

Answer a question on the left and the list builds here. Ten questions, none of them about how accessible your site is.

What it checks

  • Whether the build will hold still

    Findings are recorded against what was on screen, so a deploy mid-week turns half the evidence into a description of something that no longer exists.

  • Whether the signed-in pages can be reached

    Login pages are in the sample list for any audit worth buying, and access is the arrangement that most often gets left until the week itself.

  • Whether testing touches real data

    An auditor working a journey leaves orders, messages and tickets behind. On real records that is somebody's actual data, and a fixture avoids the whole question.

  • Whether the decisions are made

    The journeys, the target level, the browser and assistive technology baseline, and who reads the report. All four are things a supplier will otherwise guess.

  • Whether there is time to act

    An audit delivered the week before a launch is a document rather than a change. GOV.UK's own advice is not to leave it until the last minute.

What it cannot tell you

  • Anything about how accessible your site is. This reads ten answers about arrangements and has never seen a page of yours. Its all-clear line says no blocker was identified from the answers you gave, and that is exactly all it means.
  • Whether your answers are right. If you say the build is stable, it believes you. The result is a mirror of what you told it.
  • Anything requiring a credential, a URL behind a login, or a report. It collects none of those, and it has no field to collect them in.
  • Whether an audit will find much. Readiness is about whether an evaluation can start cleanly, which is a different question from what it will discover.

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