Expert Accessibility Testing
for Every User

WCAG 2.1 is organized into three conformance levels: A (minimum), AA (standard), and AAA (enhanced). Level A covers the most critical barriers. Level AA adds requirements that significantly improve usability for people with disabilities. It is the legally accepted benchmark in ADA litigation and Section 508 compliance, and the target for most STS engagements. Level AAA addresses edge cases and specialized accessibility needs. Achieving full AAA conformance is often impractical for general-purpose software, and most organizations focus on AA as their goal. Learn about our approach to WCAG compliance testing.

Not necessarily, but expert testers who work with assistive technology daily produce significantly better results than those who only run automated tools. Our testers use NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver regularly. They know how these tools behave in practice, which means they catch implementation issues that automated scanners and novice testers consistently miss. The WCAG criteria can be technically met while still producing a confusing experience for actual screen reader users. Expert manual testing closes that gap. Our QA consulting team brings this depth to every engagement.

A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) is a standardized document that declares your product's conformance against WCAG and Section 508 criteria. It lists each requirement, your conformance status, and any known exceptions. If you sell software to government agencies, educational institutions, or large enterprises, you will almost certainly be asked for a VPAT as part of procurement. Even outside those contexts, a VPAT is a useful internal document. It captures the current state of your accessibility program and gives developers clear guidance on what to fix. STS produces VPATs as a standard deliverable of every accessibility audit.

At minimum, run a full accessibility audit before major releases and whenever significant UI changes are introduced. In practice, the most effective approach is integrating lightweight accessibility checks into your regular QA cycle. That means automated tooling on every build plus manual spot-checks on new or changed components. A comprehensive manual audit annually keeps your VPAT current and identifies accumulated drift. If your product serves regulated industries (healthcare, government, education), more frequent cycles are worth the investment given the legal exposure of falling out of conformance. See our functional testing services for how we integrate accessibility into broader QA cycles.

No. Automated tools consistently catch between 30 and 40 percent of WCAG failures, specifically the ones that are deterministic and rule-based: missing alt text, insufficient color contrast ratios, form inputs without labels. The remaining 60 to 70 percent require human judgment: evaluating whether an image's alt text is meaningful in context, whether focus order is logical for the actual workflow, whether a complex widget is genuinely navigable by screen reader, whether error messages are actually helpful. Organizations that rely solely on automated scans leave the majority of accessibility issues undiscovered and still face legal exposure. Manual testing is not optional. It is where the real value is.