Do you need a web accessibility certificate?

What the law asks for is not called a certificate

Neither European nor US accessibility law sets up a body that certifies websites, or an official seal you have to display. What they require is that your product conforms, and that you can show it. In Europe, that document has a name of its own: the accessibility statement. It says how far your site conforms, which standard it was evaluated against, what doesn't conform yet and why, and how someone can complain if they hit a barrier. In the United States, what procurement asks for is an ACR. Neither one is a certificate.

If you want to know which framework covers you and since when, we explain it in which accessibility law applies to you.

So are the certificates being sold worthless?

No, and it's worth being precise here, because there's a lot of noise around this. Serious voluntary certification programs do exist. In Spain, AENOR certifies web accessibility against UNE-EN 301549 and WCAG at Levels AA and AAA, and re-checks the site every six months to confirm it's still accessible over time.

Here's what those programs actually are: voluntary third-party verification. They're useful as proof to a client or in a public tender, and they don't replace the legal obligation, because the obligation is to conform and to document it.

Why an accessibility overlay is not compliance

One difference does matter: what holds any seal up is the evaluation behind it. A badge that shows up minutes after you paste a script into your site has evaluated nothing. Nothing automated can tell you whether an image's alt text describes what the image shows, whether the tab order makes sense, or whether an error message is announced when it appears. Those get checked by hand, with a keyboard and a screen reader, or they don't get checked.

What an evaluation that holds up looks like

The W3C publishes a methodology for this, WCAG-EM. It sets out how to choose which pages get evaluated, how to record each criterion, and how to state the result, so that someone else can repeat the evaluation and reach the same conclusion. A serious report follows it.

WCAG-EM includes a sampling procedure, and that's what almost every audit in this market runs on. What gets quoted less often is the order the methodology puts it in: its own first recommendation is to evaluate the entire digital product, and to skip the sampling procedure wherever that's feasible. Sampling is the fallback.

A tuaccesible site audit does the first one. We review page by page and link by link. A sample is enough to estimate the state of a site. The whole site is what backs a statement, or an ACR, with no gaps in it.

Which document you need, depending on where you sell

• United States. An ACR, short for Accessibility Conformance Report. It's the VPAT template completed for your product: criterion by criterion, marked Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support, or Not Applicable, with remarks. It's a self-disclosure, signed off by the vendor, and it's what government procurement teams and large enterprise buyers ask for before they buy software.
• Europe. An accessibility statement backed by an evaluation against WCAG and EN 301 549. It's what anyone reviewing your compliance will ask to see.
• Latin America. It varies by country, and in most of them the requirement applies only to the public sector. If you sell into Europe or the United States, their rules apply to you no matter where your company is based.

What we deliver

We don't issue seals. We deliver the evaluation any of those documents rests on, and the documents themselves:

• An audit against WCAG 2.2, Level AA as the minimum, with the criteria table one by one.
• The accessibility statement drafted and ready to publish.
• The ACR, on its own or alongside the full report with screenshots and examples.

What we do issue, and what every one of those documents rests on, is a written record of conformance for a defined scope on a specific date: which pages were reviewed, against which version of the standard, with which assistive technology, and what each criterion returned, including the ones that pass. If someone later asks you to prove the state of your product on the day you shipped it, that's the document that answers.

If you later want to go through a third-party certification program, the work is already done: what those programs review is exactly this.

Before you hire anyone

Tell us what you need audited and on what timeline. We'll tell you which document your case actually needs, even if you don't end up hiring anyone.

Email us or see the full service details.