Why a one-off accessibility audit is not enough
A one-off accessibility audit is a thorough examination of a website’s state on a particular date, producing a list of findings and recommendations. It is a useful first step. The problem begins when a business makes it the final step: the audit is ticked off, the findings are resolved and the subject is considered closed. Six months later, some of those fixes may no longer reflect the current website.
A common problem: the audit is treated as a permanent confirmation
An audit is a photograph. It captures the website on the day it was carried out—not a month later, when you deploy a new feature.
That is the heart of the issue: accessibility is not a property that you configure once and that then remains unchanged. It can be broken subtly with every code change, just like functionality. A new designer lightens the text and breaks its contrast. A checkout redesign removes labels from fields. A developer adds a modal window that cannot be closed with a keyboard. No one has done anything wrong—it simply was not being monitored.
After six months of development, you may therefore have a “completed audit” in a drawer while some of its fixes no longer match the live website. Without continuous checks, new barriers can remain unnoticed until a customer reports them or another inspection identifies them.
How to combine an audit with continuous checks
Instead of taking a single photograph once a year, you can introduce checks at agreed intervals or after selected changes.
We can integrate automated checks into your CI/CD, using tools such as axe-core or IBM Equal Access. During selected runs, they flag machine-detectable issues shortly after they arise, while the team still remembers the change clearly.
If you do not want checks in your own pipeline, we can scan the website regularly by agreement—externally and without making changes to your infrastructure. We compare the result with the previous run and configure notifications around changes so that routine reports do not create unnecessary noise.
A one-off in-depth audit is valuable as a baseline, but even a manual audit does not guarantee that every issue will be found. A combination of automated checks, regular manual verification and clear ownership between releases helps maintain the resulting state.
What you gain
- You reduce the risk that accessibility will deteriorate unnoticed after changes.
- You can detect a machine-identifiable issue shortly after a change, when its cause is easier to find.
- Routine issues are monitored continuously, allowing manual checks to focus on the meaning of the content and complex interactions.
Next step
Have you completed an audit and want its results to last? Or are you starting from scratch? Contact us—we will agree a free initial scan and propose a way to monitor accessibility continuously, rather than once a year.