WCAG compliance audit

Description

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the de facto global standard for digital accessibility; the EU Web Accessibility Directive, the US ADA Title III as interpreted by DOJ in the Robles v. Domino's line of cases, the European Accessibility Act effective June 2025, and Section 508 for US federal procurement all reference WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at AA conformance level as the operative bar. The four POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) decompose into 50-plus success criteria across A, AA, and AAA tiers; AA is the universally-cited compliance level. An audit covers each AA criterion against the actual product (not a representative subset), produces a finding-by-finding remediation list, and feeds back into the development workflow so new shipping does not regress what the audit just fixed. The structurally interesting piece is that WCAG is genuinely engineering work, not a documentation exercise; criteria like keyboard navigation, ARIA semantics, focus management, and color contrast either pass or fail at the implementation level, and a clean audit one quarter does not survive six months of feature shipping without continuous-accessibility tooling baked into CI. Litigation exposure is the operationally relevant pressure; ADA-based class actions against inaccessible commercial sites have been a steady plaintiff-bar revenue stream and tend to settle quickly when the audit shows known criteria failures.

Required by (7 regulations)

• ACA

  Accessible Canada Act, S.C. 2019, c. 10; AODA, S.O. 2005, c. 11

• ADA

  42 U.S.C. §§12101–12213

• DDA

  Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth)

• EAA

  European Accessibility Act technical reference (EN 301 549) maps WCAG 2.1 AA.

  Directive (EU) 2019/882

• EN 301 549

  Direct mapping.

  ETSI EN 301 549 V3.2.1 (2021-03)

• Equality Act

  UK reasonable-adjustments duty.

  Equality Act 2010, c. 15

• Section 508

  US federal procurement accessibility standard.

  29 U.S.C. §794d; 36 CFR Part 1194

Fulfilled by (3)

• level-access · full · medium effort · $$$
• deque · full · medium effort · $$
• In-house build · high effort

ClearLaunch does not accept payment from vendors. Methodology.

Evidence formats

• WCAG audit report
• remediation tracker
• automated-test reports (axe / Lighthouse)