WCAG Accessibility Consultant

WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the technical standard nearly every accessibility requirement points at. It has three conformance levels: A, AA and AAA. AA is the practical target and the level referenced by most laws, procurement policies and settlements.

WCAG 2.1 AA is the common baseline today, with 2.2 adding a small number of further criteria around focus appearance and dragging. Which version you are held to is a legal and contractual question for your counsel, but building to 2.1 AA and picking up 2.2 additions as you go is the practical approach.

No. Overlays sit on top of your site and try to patch accessibility at runtime, and they consistently fail to fix the underlying markup while breaking assistive technology that is already working. Sites running them have been frequently targeted in accessibility litigation, and screen reader users have publicly opposed them in large numbers.\n\nIf a vendor promises compliance from a single script tag, that is the strongest available signal to fix the site properly instead.

Automated tooling first, because it is fast and finds real problems: Lighthouse and axe across representative templates rather than every page. Then manual testing, which is where the important failures show up: navigating the site by keyboard alone, checking focus visibility and order, reading through the heading structure, and testing forms end to end.

The output is a triaged list. Every finding gets a category, a recommendation and an effort estimate, and false positives get called out with the reason rather than quietly dropped.

No, and that gap is why so many sites with clean scan reports are still unusable. Automated tooling reliably catches roughly a third of WCAG criteria: missing alt attributes, contrast ratios, form labels, empty links.\n\nWhat it cannot judge is whether alt text is meaningful, whether the tab order matches the visual order, whether a custom component behaves sensibly under a screen reader, or whether an error message actually tells someone what went wrong. Those need a person.

The same handful of things on almost every site I audit:

• Focus indicators removed in CSS because they looked untidy.
• Header menus that only open on hover, unreachable by keyboard.
• A skip link that is broken, hidden permanently, or points at nothing.
• Heading levels used as styling, so the structure skips from h2 to h5.
• Images with missing or auto-generated alt text, often the page title repeated on every image.
• Decorative icons and SVGs announced to screen readers as content.
• Form fields with placeholder text instead of a real label.

For a typical corporate WordPress site, the triaged list is usually days rather than months of work, because most findings repeat across templates and one fix closes many instances. Custom interactive components, complex forms and video experiences take longer.\n\nThe honest answer comes after triage. I would rather scope it from a real audit than quote a number before looking at the site.

Yes, and that is usually the only part of this work that needs design involvement. When a brand color fails contrast, I bring the measurements and the options: a darker variant used only for text, a different background pairing, or a weight change. The design team decides, and I implement it consistently across the theme.

I can supply the engineering side: what the site does today, what has been remediated, what remains and why, in language a reviewer can evaluate. That is normally what stalls these questionnaires.\n\nThe formal VPAT document itself is typically completed by your team or a specialist accessibility auditor, and I am happy to work alongside one.

A fair amount of it overlaps. Correct heading structure, meaningful alt text, descriptive link text and semantic markup all help crawlers and AI answer engines interpret a page, and several of those items show up in both my accessibility and SEO fix lists.\n\nIt is a genuine side benefit rather than the reason to do the work, and I would not sell accessibility as an SEO tactic.

Both happen, but a one-time pass decays. Every redesign, new page template, new plugin and content push reintroduces problems, and the site drifts back within a year.\n\nInside a maintenance retainer, new templates get checked before they ship, alt text enforcement lives in the CMS, and periodic re-scans catch regressions while they are small. That is where the standard actually holds.