We started auditing accessibility on client projects and didn't like what we found
About two months ago I loaded up a client’s site — an online language academy — in a screen reader just to test something unrelated, and I couldn’t even fill in the contact form. The phone field had no associated label, the submit button was a div with an onclick, and focus kept getting lost every time the mobile menu opened. We’d been maintaining that site for a year and a half. Nobody had ever tested it that way.
That was the trigger. From there we started running a basic accessibility pass on every new project and, gradually, on the ones already under maintenance. Nothing like a full WCAG AA certification or a three-week audit: we don’t have the time for that, and honestly the average client isn’t going to pay for it. But an afternoon’s pass with axe DevTools, plain keyboard navigation and, when the project warrants it, VoiceOver on Safari.
What we found was worse than I expected. Across eight projects we reviewed between April and June, all but one had some contrast issue that would fail a basic AA check. Five had decorative images with a misused alt attribute, or the opposite: informative images with no alt at all. Three had modals that trapped focus so badly you couldn’t close them with a keyboard. In one case, an online kitchenware store, the entire checkout depended on hover, so on mobile, with a screen reader, completing a purchase was literally impossible without being able to see the screen.
I’m not saying this to make us look good. We’d written part of that code ourselves. The accordion component we reuse across half a dozen sites had been mishandling aria-expanded since 2024. Well, it handled it, but only if the JS loaded before the CSS — a dumb bug nobody caught because nobody had tested it with a keyboard.
What changed after that wasn’t some huge process. We added a ten-point checklist that runs before every handover: contrast checked with the Chrome extension, full tab-through with no mouse, labels on every input, visible focus, headings in logical order (no jumping from h1 to h4 because it “looks better”), alt text reviewed by hand instead of whatever the CMS auto-generated. Ten minutes, not a formal audit, but it catches eighty percent of the serious stuff.
What we haven’t figured out is how to sell it. Not a single client has ever asked about accessibility when requesting a quote. So right now we fold it into the project at no extra charge, and that’s not sustainable long term if the workload grows. One public-sector client did ask for it explicitly, because of the regulations that apply to them, and there we billed the full audit as its own line item, which is how it should work every time.
I still haven’t worked out how to bring that up with everyone else without it sounding like I’m selling fear.