Auditing your site

If somebody within your team or organisation has the technical skills to do it, they should do a detailed audit to see if your sample content and functionality is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.

If there’s nobody in your organisation with the skills to audit your content and functionality is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, you can pay a third party to do a detailed audit instead.

They’ll tell you what needs fixing and - once you’ve made the fixes - can audit your website again to check it’s accessible. You can also ask them to prioritise and fix some or all of the issues.

You’ll also need to budget for the cost of fixing problems and then retesting things. The time it takes to fix things can vary.

After you have fixed the accessibility problems you should get your site re-audited which normally takes about half the time of the original audit.

There’s guidance on choosing a supplier and writing an audit brief in the UK government Service Manual.

If you cannot reasonably afford to pay an external supplier to do a detailed WCAG 2.1 audit, you can judge that it would be a ‘disproportionate burden’. This means a cost that is too much for your organisation to reasonably spend.

For example, if an external supplier would charge £10,000 for an audit but your yearly budget after essential running costs is £2,000, you could argue it would be a disproportionate burden to pay for the audit.

In this case, you can do a basic check for accessibility without any technical knowledge.