An inaccessible site loses visitors, suppresses rankings, invites legal risk, and is harder for AI crawlers to parse. We audit your site against WCAG 2.1 and the full Lighthouse accessibility checklist, fix what we find, and deliver a documented before-and-after report.
Get StartedAt a Glance
Web accessibility is the practice of building sites that work for users with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive differences. Google's Page Experience signal rewards accessible, well-structured pages. AI crawlers and screen readers parse the same semantic HTML. A Lighthouse accessibility score below 90 is a signal that your site has gaps that affect both users and search visibility. Our accessibility audit and remediation service is available as a one-time engagement, no retainer required.
| Service | Accessibility Audit and Remediation |
| Standards | WCAG 2.1 AA, WCAG 2.2, Lighthouse Accessibility |
| Engagement | One-time project, no monthly retainer required |
| Tools | Lighthouse, Axe, PageSpeed Insights, manual keyboard testing |
| Deliverable | Audit report, fix implementation, before-and-after Lighthouse score comparison |
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international standard for accessible web content. The 2.1 AA conformance level is the legal and technical benchmark in the United States, EU, and most other jurisdictions.
Content must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. If information can only be understood by seeing or hearing it, users with disabilities are excluded.
All UI components and navigation must be operable without a mouse. Users who rely on keyboard or switch access cannot use a site that requires pointing or dragging.
Content and UI behavior must be understandable. Forms must be clearly labeled. Error messages must explain what went wrong. Navigation must behave consistently across pages.
Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide range of assistive technologies. Invalid HTML or misused ARIA roles cause screen readers to misrepresent content.
Lighthouse runs a series of automated accessibility checks derived from the Axe accessibility engine and scores each page from 0 to 100. A score of 90 or above passes the threshold Google considers acceptable. Scores below 90 indicate problems that likely affect real users and appear in PageSpeed Insights alongside your Core Web Vitals.
Each failed audit is weighted by severity. Failures on high-impact checks (missing alt text, broken form labels, insufficient color contrast) lower the score more than minor ARIA misconfigurations. Lighthouse reports both the specific elements that failed and the WCAG success criterion each failure violates.
Lighthouse catches roughly 30 to 40 percent of all accessibility issues. The rest require manual testing with real assistive technologies. Our audit combines Lighthouse and Axe automated scans with keyboard-only navigation testing and logical structure review to surface issues that automated tools cannot detect.
Accessibility is not a separate concern from SEO. The same practices that make a site usable for assistive technology users also make it more crawlable, more indexable, and more legible to AI systems.
Googlebot and AI crawlers parse HTML structure the same way screen readers do. Proper heading hierarchy, landmark elements, and labeled links give crawlers clear signals about content hierarchy and page purpose. A site with missing or broken semantic structure is harder to index accurately.
Google's Page Experience evaluation includes the full context of how usable a page is for real users. Accessibility failures that create dead ends for keyboard users, invisible focus states, or unlabeled form elements all contribute to poor user experience signals that feed back into ranking.
Descriptive alt text on images is both an accessibility requirement and a direct SEO input. Google uses alt text to understand image content and context. Missing or generic alt text (like "image" or the file name) leaves keyword and context signals on the table for every image on your site.
Links with clear, descriptive anchor text help both screen reader users and Googlebot understand where a link goes and why. Generic link text like "click here" or "read more" is an accessibility failure that also reduces the value of internal links for SEO.
AI systems that power features like Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT search all rely on being able to parse clean, well-structured HTML. Pages that use proper heading hierarchy, semantic landmarks, and descriptive link text give AI systems clearer signals about what the content means and how it is organized.
A page that a screen reader cannot navigate is typically also a page that AI systems cannot extract content from cleanly. Both rely on the same underlying signals: logical document structure, text alternatives for non-text content, and predictable navigation patterns.
Schema markup is most effective when it describes content that is also present in accessible HTML. If your FAQ schema references questions that are only visible via JavaScript toggle and not in the initial HTML parse, AI crawlers that do not fully render JavaScript will miss that content entirely. Accessible HTML ensures schema and visible content are always aligned.
In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been applied to websites by federal courts in multiple jurisdictions. While the ADA does not name a specific technical standard, courts and the Department of Justice have pointed to WCAG 2.1 AA as the relevant benchmark for compliance. Section 508 applies specifically to federal agencies and organizations that receive federal funding.
In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act took effect in 2025 and applies WCAG 2.1 AA requirements to a broad range of digital products and services.
We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. If you need a legal assessment of your compliance obligations, consult a qualified attorney. What we can tell you is that a documented accessibility audit and remediation effort demonstrates good-faith effort to address known issues, which is relevant to any compliance discussion.
We run Lighthouse and Axe automated scans across your key pages and document every failure with the specific WCAG criterion it violates. We follow this with keyboard-only navigation testing to catch issues that automated tools miss: focus traps, invisible focus states, skip navigation failures, and logical reading order problems.
We categorize every failure by severity (blocker, serious, moderate, minor) and by the population it affects (visual, motor, cognitive, auditory). Blockers that prevent whole categories of users from accessing your site are addressed first. We also identify which failures have the largest impact on your Lighthouse score so you see score improvements alongside real user improvements.
We implement fixes across HTML structure, CSS (contrast, focus styles), JavaScript (keyboard event handling, ARIA state management), and content (alt text, link names, heading hierarchy). Every fix is tested against the original failure to confirm it resolves the issue without introducing new problems.
You receive a full audit report documenting every issue found, its WCAG criterion, its severity, and what was done to fix it. The report includes before-and-after Lighthouse accessibility scores for each audited page and a plain-language summary of what was done and why. No retainer required to get started.
Common Questions
Directly and indirectly, yes. Google's Page Experience signal rewards pages that are usable for real users, and accessibility failures create friction for a meaningful portion of the population. More directly, the practices that make a site accessible (semantic heading structure, descriptive alt text, clear link text, valid HTML) are the same practices that help Googlebot understand and index content accurately. A Lighthouse accessibility score below 90 is also visible in PageSpeed Insights alongside Core Web Vitals, which signals to technical reviewers that there are quality gaps.
Google's threshold for "Good" in Lighthouse is 90 or above. A score of 100 is achievable and should be the target for any site that wants to demonstrate full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance on automated checks. Keep in mind that a score of 100 on Lighthouse does not mean full WCAG compliance, since Lighthouse only catches 30 to 40 percent of all accessibility issues. A 100 score means you have addressed everything automated tools can detect, which is a strong starting position.
Yes. Most accessibility issues on WordPress sites are fixable without a theme rebuild. Common fixes include adding and improving alt text across the media library, fixing form input labels in contact and checkout forms, correcting color contrast issues in the theme CSS, adding visible focus styles, improving heading hierarchy in page templates, and correcting ARIA attribute usage in dynamic components like accordions, modals, and navigation menus. We document every change with before-and-after evidence.
WCAG 2.1 extended the original WCAG 2.0 standard with 17 new success criteria focused on mobile accessibility, low vision, and cognitive disabilities. WCAG 2.2, published in 2023, added 9 more criteria with particular emphasis on focus appearance and cognitive accessibility. WCAG 2.1 AA is the current legal and technical benchmark in most jurisdictions. WCAG 2.2 is increasingly referenced in new legislation and procurement requirements. Our audit checks against both standards.
No. Our accessibility audit and remediation service is available as a one-time engagement. Many clients come to us with a specific Lighthouse score target, a compliance concern they want to document, or a new site that needs an accessibility review before launch. Send a message or a Loom walkthrough of the pages you want audited and we will review your current scores and come back with a clear picture of what needs to be addressed.
Send a message or a quick Loom walkthrough of the pages you want reviewed. We will run a full Lighthouse and Axe audit and come back with a prioritized list of what to fix. No retainer required.
Send a Message or Loom