Your organization will benefit from accessibility testing in more ways than you are probably aware of. We'll tell you how you can build a strategy to reap those benefits.

What is accessibility testing?

Accessibility testing (sometimes referred to as a11y) is the process of evaluating whether websites and mobile apps are usable by people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, and speech impairments. 

In the QA world, it's common for testers to focus on visual or hearing disabilities while overlooking other disabilities that also make using the web harder.

Some examples of overlooked disabilities include:

• People with arthritis or other mobility issues who have difficulty moving a mouse and prefer keystrokes to navigate through tabs.
• People with photosensitivity who may get seizures from flickering or flashing components.
• People with cognitive disabilities such as dysgraphia or dyslexia who have difficulty processing information in busy or inconsistent designs.

What does accessibility testing check for?

Accessibility testing evaluates five core areas of digital usability:

• Visual accessibility testing: Checks for adjustable text size, customizable color schemes, proper contrast ratios, and compatibility with screen readers (assistive software that reads on-screen content aloud).
• Auditory accessibility testing: Checks for accurate closed captions, transcripts for audio content, and visual alternatives for audio cues.
• Motor accessibility testing: Ensures full keyboard navigation, easily clickable buttons and links, and support for alternative input devices.
• Cognitive accessibility testing: Looks for clear, simple language, consistent layout, and options to disable animations or auto-play content.
• Speech accessibility testing: Verifies voice-controlled interfaces, alternative input methods, adjustable speech recognition sensitivity, and text-based command options.

The specific tests you automate and run will depend on your accessibility goals. But before getting into the accessibility standards to think through when running these tests, knowing why it's a requirement for businesses is key.

In 2025, 94.8% of home pages still failed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), leaving measurable gains in customer experience, loyalty, reputation, and search visibility on the table.

Why does accessibility testing matter?

Accessibility testing matters because it expands your user base, improves SEO rankings, ensures legal compliance, and increases revenue. Organizations that prioritize accessibility consistently outperform their competitors across revenue, market performance, and profitability. 

Beyond guaranteeing equitable access to the web for everyone, there are concrete business reasons to build and run automated accessibility tests: attracting and retaining a larger audience, improving search visibility, protecting against lawsuits, and building more resilient products.

Recent research highlights the upside for companies that prioritize accessibility testing:

• Companies that prioritize accessibility outperform their competitors, generating 28% higher revenue, 2x net income, and being 2x more likely to outperform peers in shareholder returns. (Accenture)
• Accessible websites rank higher in search, with higher accessibility scores linked to 24% more organic traffic and ranking for 27% more keywords. (Accessibility Checker)
• 1,432 website accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 (Accessibility.com)

What are the legal requirements for digital accessibility?

The United States, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires web and mobile products to provide accessible interfaces to people with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities, has been interpreted by courts to apply to websites and digital content. It's led to a rise in lawsuits against businesses that don't have a fully accessible online presence.

Similar legislation exists in Canada, the European Union, the UK, Australia, and Brazil.

Understanding WCAG standards: The foundation of accessibility testing

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a W3C standard, is considered the gold standard for accessibility guidelines. The WCAG success criteria are testable statements that confirm a given website's content is accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities (PWD).

Many countries' regulatory bodies—including the US, EU, UK, and Canada—use WCAG standards to measure compliance with the law.

WCAG is built on four fundamental principles known as POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust). 

• Perceivable: Users must be able to perceive all content in at least one usable way. Information cannot rely on sight, sound, or color alone and must support alternatives like screen readers, captions, larger text, or simplified language. Images, for example, need descriptive alt text so non-visual users can understand their purpose.
• Operable: Users must be able to interact with the site using the inputs available to them. This means no mouse-only actions, full keyboard access for interactive elements, enough time to complete tasks, and no content that triggers seizures. Navigation must be clear so users know where they are and how to move through the site.
• Understandable: Users must be able to understand both the content and how to use the interface. Labels, instructions, and interactions need to be clear and predictable, and error messages must explain what went wrong and how to fix it.
• Robust: Content must work reliably across browsers, devices, and assistive technologies. Sites need to follow web standards so they remain usable as user agents and accessibility tools change over time.

WCAG conformance levels explained (WCAG 2.2)

WCAG defines accessibility requirements as testable success criteria. WCAG 2.2 builds on WCAG 2.1 and 2.0, so sites that conform to WCAG 2.2 also meet the requirements of laws and policies that reference earlier versions.

As of WCAG 2.2, there are 86 total success criteria. Conformance is measured at three levels, with each level requiring full compliance with all criteria at that level and below.

Important note: Conformance is not the same as certification. To be certified you must be audited by an accredited body.

Best automated accessibility testing tools

The best automated accessibility testing option depends on whether your team wants tooling only or a system that supports long-term accessibility ownership.

QA Wolf

QA Wolf provides a platform and service for automated accessibility testing across web and mobile apps. Teams can build and maintain accessibility checks in-house or have QA Wolf’s engineers do it for them.

QA Wolf supports:

• Automated accessibility regression testing for web, iOS, and Android
• WCAG-based checks with audit trails
• Platform-specific coverage for Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Android Accessibility Guidelines
• CI execution and issue filing directly into your issue tracker
• In-house ownership or outsourced maintenance, depending on team needs

QA Wolf uses industry-standard accessibility engines, including Deque Axe and Google Lighthouse, while providing the infrastructure to run, manage, and evolve accessibility tests over time.

Axe

Axe is an open-source accessibility testing engine from Deque. It evaluates pages against WCAG rules and integrates into many frameworks and CI pipelines. Teams using Axe directly are responsible for test design, maintenance, and manual validation.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is Chrome’s built-in accessibility auditing tool. It runs automated audits in Chrome DevTools and CI environments but is primarily suited for page-level checks rather than long-running accessibility test suites.

All automated accessibility tools identify about 80% of WCAG issues. Issues involving comprehension, interaction clarity, and assistive technology behavior still require human judgment, which is why teams should combine automation with manual review.

How to start accessibility testing

Thankfully, you don't have to pore over all the different legislation across constituencies to know if your website is compliant. WCAG provides a comprehensive framework for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities.

Before you start to monitor your conformance with WCAG standards, define a general strategy.

Step 1: Decide on a realistic target

Choosing a WCAG target doesn't require an extraordinary amount of analysis into personas and user needs. In most cases, using WCAG as your standard will already encapsulate any testing you would discover on your own. The WCAG standard will also be fully auditable by a third party should you decide to get certified.

Most organizations target WCAG Level AA compliance, which addresses the biggest barriers for disabled users and satisfies legal requirements in most jurisdictions.

Step 2: Choose a testing tool

Once your team decides to conduct accessibility testing, the next step is choosing how much ownership you want.

• Choose QA Wolf if you want accessibility testing to run continuously without building and maintaining infrastructure, test cases, and audits.
• Choose Axe if your team plans to implement and maintain accessibility checks directly in CI.
• Use Lighthouse for developer-led spot checks, not as a primary testing strategy.

Most teams targeting WCAG Level AA in production environments choose a solution like QA Wolf that runs accessibility checks automatically on every release and flags regressions immediately.

Step 3: Run your accessibility tests

You can run your accessibility checks as a static analyzer on the source code or as end-to-end tests on a rendered page. E2E testing is the better default because it reflects how users with disabilities will perceive and interact with your product. 

If you’re building accessibility tests in-house, Playwright provides documentation on implementing accessibility tests as part of your standard regression suite.

Using QA Wolf, checks run automatically as part of your existing end-to-end test suite, using Axe and Lighthouse. Your team can build and maintain these checks or have QA Wolf maintain them, depending on how much ownership you want.

Regardless of tooling, accessibility tests should be integrated into your CI/CD pipeline. This will give your developers instant feedback if new code causes an accessibility issue where there wasn't one before.

Step 4: Run regular accessibility audits

At WCAG Level AAA, the highest level of WCAG conformance, there are success criteria that require human judgment and can’t be automated. For those criteria, you'll need to perform occasional manual accessibility audits.

There are manual auditing tools like Deque that allow you to find violations on your own. Even if your organization isn't shooting for certification, manual audit tools can still be valuable for identifying the last 20% of problems that automated tools can't yet catch.

Automate your accessibility testing process

Accessibility testing helps you identify and resolve issues that keep people with disabilities from fully engaging with your website and applications. Adhering to accessibility standards, like WCAG, mitigates the legal risks of noncompliance and broadens your potential user base, opening up new avenues for market expansion and customer satisfaction.

QA Wolf runs automated accessibility checks as part of your E2E regression suite and logs results with a complete audit trail. Teams can build and maintain WCAG-aligned checks themselves or have QA Wolf do it for them, and every run surfaces regressions immediately in CI. You can review how this works in detail or schedule a demo to see the workflow end to end.