Why Pay Thousands for Super-Skewed Accessibility Scan Analytics?

People are drawn to accessibility analytics — and understandably so. Who doesn’t like a nice pie chart?

But the problem that I’ve watched paraded in front of me for 7 years is that the analytics are usually based on scan results.

You know, the same scan results that only flag 25% of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria and are subject to false negatives and occasionally false positives. Those scan results.

What’s happening is people are paying for premium subscriptions to accessibility scanning tools that repackage the same basic scans available for free, bundled with upsells. The upgrade includes premium add-ons like pie charts, scores, and progress reports — but these are based on scan errors, not full WCAG conformance.

That’s a Gulf of Mexico–sized difference.

Here’s why it matters: the objective for almost all of our clients — and likely anyone seeking professional accessibility services — is full WCAG 2.1 AA or WCAG 2.2 AA conformance.

The objective isn’t to have 0 errors on an automated scan (although it’s really nice to have zero errors).

So even if you used a scan to find accessibility issues on your website — and you fixed those issues — you’d still need an accessibility audit, just like you would before the scan.

You’ll probably have fewer accessibility issues, which is great, but you still need the audit to find all of the issues so you know what to fix.

Stated another way: an audit report is always going to supersede scan results, so if your objective is WCAG conformance, there’s not much of a point to purchasing a scan.

Can a scan be beneficial?

Surely, but we can scan our web pages and start working through issues for free.

And, again, it’s rather hollow to chase a 100% accessibility score and live by monthly progress reports when it’s not based on all of the accessibility issues for our digital asset.

Illustration:

John Manager: Hey Bill, how close are we to making our website ADA compliant?

Bill Developer: This software says we’re 67% finished.

Me: But that’s 67% of the 25% of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria that can be flagged by a scan.

So What’s the Point?

Paying $2,500 for an annual subscription to scan accessibility analytics doesn’t make sense for most organizations.

The analytics need to be based on an audit report so that the analytics are accurate and representative of the progress towards full WCAG conformance.

We created Accessibility Tracker to provide just such analytics. Tracker’s analytics are based on your actual accessibility audit report, not a scan.

You just upload the report and then you have accurate accessibility analytics that you can work from.

You can start with a free plan at AccessibilityTracker.com.

Here’s a YouTube video where I explain the difference between scan analytics and accessibility audit-based analytics: