Methodology
What "verified" means here.
The accessibility industry has a trust problem: scanners overstate what they find, widgets overstate what they fix. Our answer is simple — we show our work on every single finding.
Candidates, not conclusions
Automated results are treated as candidates only. Each one is independently re-executed with a targeted check, and gets exactly one of three statuses:
Our re-execution confirms the failure. The finding carries a stamp — method, timestamp, evidence. Example: a contrast candidate is recomputed from rendered styles; the stamp reads "2.81:1 measured, 4.5:1 required."
Our re-execution contradicts the scanner. It never appears in your issue log as a defect — it appears on a transparency sheet, because you deserve to see what we ruled out and why.
Screen-reader nuance and judgment calls are tested manually with NVDA and marked expert-reviewed only after that review actually happens. Never by default.
How re-execution works
- Accessible-name re-inspection — every name source (labels, alt text, ARIA, text content) re-read from the live page, independently of the scanner's engine.
- Contrast recomputation — colors resolved from rendered styles, composited through transparency, measured with the WCAG luminance formula.
- Keyboard tab-walk — we actually press Tab through your page and record where focus goes, where it can't go, and where it gets stuck.
- Focus-visibility comparison — screenshots with and without focus, compared byte-for-byte. If no pixel changes, keyboard users are navigating blind.
- ARIA re-checks — roles, states, and ID references validated against the specification and the live document.
Three of our standard checks have no scanner equivalent at all — keyboard traps, invisible focus, and mouse-only controls — because they require behaving like a user rather than parsing markup. They're consistently among the most serious barriers we find.
What we don't do
- We don't guarantee or certify legal compliance — nobody honestly can, and the FTC fined an overlay vendor $1M for claims in that direction[3]. We provide technical evidence and remediation guidance; your attorney owns legal strategy.
- We don't sell or install overlay widgets. Ever.
- We don't deliver raw scanner output. Unverified findings are not findings.
- We don't test what we can't reach: audits cover a representative sample at a point in time. Sites change — that's what monitoring (re-verification) is for.
Sources
Every statistic we use, with its origin. Figures are re-checked quarterly; when a number ages out, we pull the claim.
- Automated-scanner coverage ~30–40%: Accessible.org analysis; Deque's own coverage report shows automated findings for 16 of 50 WCAG 2.1 AA criteria.
- 2025 US ADA website lawsuit filings (3,948; +23.8% YoY; 983 widget-equipped sites sued): EcomBack annual report.
- FTC order against accessiBe ($1M, final April 2025): FTC press release.
- European Accessibility Act enforceable 28 June 2025: Bird & Bird briefing.