Digital Access Review

The six sides applied to a website, app or digital service. Same framework as the building audit, different medium. Prices are published in full.

Your scan is green and your users still cannot book

A site can pass every automated check and still be hostile. That is not an edge case. It is the normal condition of a site that was "made accessible" by a vendor.

Here is what that looks like, and every one of these passes an automated test:

• Every image has alt text, and all of it says "image", "photo", "banner".
• The site is fully keyboard operable, and the focus indicator is a one-pixel dotted outline nobody can see.
• The access page exists, is thorough and accurate, and is linked only from the footer.
• The booking form is perfectly labelled, and the only way to book a wheelchair space is to ring a phone number.
• The accessibility statement claims full conformance, is undated, and names nobody.
• There is a text-only version. It works beautifully. It is 2003 in a corner of 2026.

Journeys, not pages

I do not audit "the website" and I do not count pages. We agree three to five core journeys at the start, and I audit those end to end. A journey is a task a real person came to do:

• Work out whether your venue is accessible, and decide whether to come
• Book and pay for a ticket, including a wheelchair space
• Contact a human being and actually get an answer
• Apply for something: a job, a membership, a grant
• Read the thing they came to read

Then I follow the whole journey, including the parts that leave your website. The confirmation email. The PDF ticket. The third-party booking widget. The payment provider.

A journey that fails inside somebody else's iframe still fails. "It is the ticketing provider" is a procurement finding, not an excuse, and the report says so and names who owns the fix.

On top of the journeys I sample one of each page type, because a fault in a template is a fault everywhere it renders. The report states exactly what was and was not examined. It will never imply coverage I did not have.

The scanner runs first, and it is not the audit

I run automated tooling before anything else, to clear the mechanical failures out of the way so the human hours go where only a human can go. That output is the digital equivalent of a measurements sheet. Necessary, and worthless on its own.

Automated tooling catches a minority of WCAG failures and detects precisely nothing in the Emotional and Cultural domains. So if a finding came from the scanner, the report says it came from the scanner. Machine output never gets presented as human judgement.

What the six domains mean online

The same six, translated to the medium:

• 01

  Physical

  Can someone operate it with the input device they actually have? Keyboard only, switch, voice, a tremor, one hand.

• 02

  Visual

  Contrast, zoom to 400%, reflow at 320px, and whether anything depends on colour alone.

• 03

  Auditory

  Captions, transcripts, and whether audio is the only route to something important.

• 04

  Cognitive

  Reading level, form pressure, time limits, and how much you have to hold in your head at once.

• 05

  Emotional

  Whether the accessible route feels like the main route or a side door. Whether asking for what you need costs you dignity.

• 06

  Cultural

  Whether disabled people appear anywhere on the site as customers rather than as a compliance obligation.

Emotional and Cultural are the product here. A scanner cannot touch them and a competitor cannot fake them.

What you get

• A report in accessible HTML, which given the subject matter should not need explaining.
• Every finding located precisely, scored, and tied to the journey it breaks.
• Three costed options per finding: the minimum that fixes it, the better answer, and the version where nobody has to ask next time.
• The zero-cost fixes listed separately at the front.
• A plain statement of what was examined and what was not.

What this is not

• Not an automated scan. If a machine could have produced the deliverable, it is not this service and I will not sell it as one.
• Not a remediation service. This diagnoses and prescribes. Implementation is a separate conversation.
• Not a certification or a legal guarantee, and the report says so in writing.
• Not a substitute for the building audit. A venue and its website are two engagements and two reports.