Audits by people with disabilities

A manual accessibility audit by people with disabilities is the most accurate way to understand how usable your website or app really is. Automated testing is fast and scales well, but it cannot judge whether an experience actually works for someone relying on assistive technology. A button can have a perfect accessible name and still sit in a flow that is impossible to complete with a screen reader. Lived-experience testing closes that gap.

Why automated testing isn’t enough

Independent research consistently shows that automated tools detect only 30–40% of WCAG success criteria. The remaining majority — meaningful alt text, logical focus order, clear error recovery, usable custom components, sensible reading sequence — requires human judgment. And no judgment is more reliable than that of someone who depends on assistive technology every day.

How the audit works

1. Scoping — We agree on the journeys, page templates, and platforms that matter most to your business and your users.
2. Expert manual testing — Auditors with disabilities work through each journey using their own assistive technology, exactly as real users do.
3. Documentation — Every barrier is captured with the assistive technology used, steps to reproduce, expected vs. actual behavior, severity, and real user impact.
4. WCAG 2.2 mapping — Each finding is mapped to a specific success criterion and conformance level (A / AA / AAA).
5. Prioritized report & debrief — You receive a clear, ranked report and a live walkthrough with the auditors.
6. Retest & sign-off — Once you ship fixes, we retest and confirm the issues are genuinely resolved.

What gets tested

• Sign-up, login, and account management
• Checkout, payments, and multi-step forms
• Navigation, search, and filtering
• Dynamic components — modals, menus, comboboxes, tabs, carousels
• Media, documents, and downloadable files (including PDFs)
• Error states, time limits, and notifications
• Any flow critical to revenue, compliance, or safety

Who tests your product

Our auditors are people with a range of disabilities — including blindness and low vision, motor disabilities, and cognitive differences — who use screen readers, magnification, switch access, voice control, and keyboard-only navigation as part of daily life. That lived experience is what surfaces the barriers conventional QA and automated scans miss.

What you receive

• A prioritized audit report mapping every issue to WCAG 2.2 with severity and user impact
• Clear reproduction steps and remediation guidance written for designers and developers
• An executive summary suitable for leadership, legal, and procurement
• A live debrief with the auditors and a retest after remediation

How it fits with the rest of QualiBooth

A manual audit is the deep, point-in-time view. Pair it with QualiBooth’s automated scanning and continuous monitoring to catch regressions between audits, and with recurring audits to keep conformance from drifting as your product evolves.