How to Automate Accessibility Testing

What Is Accessibility Testing and Why Does It Matter?

Building a digital product is hard enough. Making sure everyone can actually use it? That’s where the real challenge begins.

Today, more than one billion people worldwide live with a disability. That’s not a niche, it’s nearly 15% of the global population. Yet somehow, the internet remains largely out of reach for many. A recent study found that only 3% of websites meet basic accessibility guidelines​. It’s an incredible number when you think about it, and a massive opportunity if you’re paying attention.

Accessibility testing ensures your digital experiences work for everyone around the world. But let’s be honest: manually combing through every page, button, and label isn’t scalable. Not when product teams ship updates weekly or daily. That’s where automation helps, it catches major issues early without slowing down development.

The Biggest Challenges in Accessibility Testing

If you’re serious about accessibility, you have to face an uncomfortable truth first: the system is working against you.

Why Does Accessibility Testing Often Happen Too Late?

Even companies with great intentions find themselves stuck. Accessibility testing usually lands at the bottom of the priority list, wedged somewhere between final QA checks and last-minute bug squashing. And by that point? It’s often too late to fix anything without breaking something else.

Here’s the thing most teams don’t talk about:

• 70% of organizations wait until the final development stages to test for accessibility​.
• Over 40% have no dedicated accessibility expert on staff​.
• Automated scans alone miss about 43% of real issues that actually affect users​.

These aren’t just small gaps, they’re huge. Let’s break it down clearly:

Still, knowing this doesn’t magically solve it. Budgets are tight. Deadlines are tighter. And let’s be real, accessibility work often feels invisible unless it goes wrong. No stakeholder gets excited about “good color contrast on form labels.” But they sure notice when a user sues for ADA non-compliance, which, by the way, is happening more and more:

ADA-related lawsuits tied to inaccessible websites jumped by over 300% in just a few years​.

How Does Early Accessibility Testing Save Time and Money?

Waiting is expensive. Fixing things post-release can cost up to 100x more than catching them early​.

And here’s a little hard-earned wisdom: users notice accessibility flaws long before the lawyers do. They just leave without saying anything.

If companies want to stop leaking customers and cash, they’ll need to stop seeing accessibility as an afterthought. It has to be baked in. Embedded. Invisible because it’s done right from the start.

If not, the financial, legal, and reputation costs just keep adding up.

The Business and Technical Impact of Accessibility

There’s a quiet myth floating around tech circles that goes something like this:
“Accessibility is important… but it’s not mission-critical.”

That thinking couldn’t be more wrong. And honestly, the numbers back it up.

How Does Accessibility Impact Revenue and User Experience?

Accessibility isn’t just about doing the right thing, it’s about protecting revenue, avoiding legal exposure, and delivering a product that actually works for everyone. Ignore it, and the consequences aren’t theoretical. They’re expensive, public, and lasting.

Let’s get specific:

• 15% of the global population lives with some form of disability​. That’s not a niche market, it’s one of the largest user bases you can serve.
  
• Companies that invest early in accessibility see up to a 40% reduction in remediation costs​.
  
• Lawsuits under ADA Title III have exploded, with digital accessibility lawsuits alone rising by 300%+ over the last few years.

When accessibility is ignored, three major problem areas show up:

And here’s something companies don’t always realize until it’s too late:
Accessibility and usability aren’t two different goals. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Poor contrast? Tiny clickable areas? Forms you can’t tab through? Those are problems for users with disabilities, but they’re also annoyances for everyone else. What slows down an NVDA screen reader user slows down a busy shopper on their phone, too.

What Kind of Technical Debt Results from Poor Accessibility?

The technical debt compounds fast. A missed heading structure today becomes a broken navigation map tomorrow. An unlabeled form today becomes a lost sale next month.

Accessibility isn’t just a one-time audit item. It’s an ongoing multiplier: for better or worse.

The question isn’t whether accessibility impacts your business. It’s whether you’ll pay for it now, or later, with interest.

How to Automate Accessibility Testing Effectively

Here’s the real trick with automating accessibility testing: it’s not just about using the right tools, it’s about thinking the right way.

Too many teams bolt on a scanner at the end of a sprint and hope for the best. It’s like checking for leaks after the boat is already in the water. You might catch a few, sure. But the deeper cracks? They’re still there, waiting.

So, what actually works?

Build It Into Your Workflow, Not Around It

How Do You Integrate Accessibility Testing into Your Development Frameworks?

The best accessibility setups aren’t separate. They live inside the development lifecycle, right next to your regular tests. 

• Start by embedding libraries like axe-core directly into Selenium, Playwright, or Jest workflows. (It’s lightweight. Your devs won’t even notice once it’s set up.)
  
• If you’re building in Salesforce, Sa11y is your friend. (Built by Salesforce engineers, tweaked exactly for dynamic UIs.)
  

Think of it like running a spell-checker while you write, not after you hit “send.”

Little bonus? You’ll catch obvious violations at code review time, not six months later when the lawsuits land.

Catch Accessibility Problems During CI/CD or Regret It Later

How Can You Add Accessibility Testing to Your CI/CD Pipelines?

Accessibility tests should run every time code goes out. No excuses.

• BrowserStack and Kobiton make it pretty painless.
  
• You can set flags in Jenkins or GitHub Actions that block merges if critical WCAG 2.1 issues pop up.

Here’s a rough idea:

Nobody’s saying this is glamorous work. But the cost of not doing it? About 100x more per bug.

Don’t Forget Dynamic Content (Where 80% of Stuff Breaks)

Here’s a dirty secret about most scanners:
They’re great at checking static pages. They’re terrible at pop-ups, modals, AJAX transitions.

You can’t just hit “Scan Page” and expect miracles.

• PayPal’s AATT tool is pretty good if you customize it.
  
• PhantomJS (or headless browsers) can help crawl through dynamic states.
  

Real accessibility automation means triggering those modals manually, letting the scanner read them, then evaluating.

Otherwise, you’re testing… half a site.

Prioritize Like a Human, Not Like a Robot

When reports flood in—and they will—you can’t treat every violation equally.

There’s a world of difference between:

• A missing <alt> tag on a blog photo, and
  
• A signup button that a blind user can’t reach because of broken focus handling.
  

Tools like Axe DevTools let you rank issues by severity.
If you’re not prioritizing critical barriers first, you’re wasting your team’s sanity.

Start with things that actually stop people from using your site.
The rest? Fix them when you can.

Remember, Automation Only Gets You 60% there

Automated tools are helpful. No doubt. But about 43% of accessibility problems still need manual testing, because only a human can judge context.

No scanner can tell you if a form label makes sense. Or if a screen reader user can navigate a weird checkout flow without getting stuck.

For real coverage?

• Run a scan.
  
• Then grab NVDA or VoiceOver.
  
• And walk through the user journey yourself.
  

You’ll catch things no bot ever will.

The Business Benefits of Automating Accessibility Testing

So, what’s the benefit of getting accessibility automation right?

The truth is, it’s bigger than just compliance checkboxes or lawsuit avoidance. Teams that make accessibility a part of their development pipelines early and stick with it, see massive advantages over time.

Not just legally. Not just ethically. Commercially, too.

Here’s what actually happens when you do it right:

1. How Does Automation Improve Delivery Speed and Quality?

Manual testing alone slows down releases. No surprise there.

But when you fold accessibility scans into your CI/CD workflows properly?
You catch most issues before they become expensive technical debt, and without adding huge testing overhead.

One large-scale study found that teams using continuous accessibility testing cut defect remediation costs by 40% on average.

In other words, accessibility becomes part of the “definition of done.” Not a last-minute scramble.

2. How Does Automation Help Lower Legal and Compliance Risks?

Nobody likes talking about lawsuits, but let’s be honest:
ADA Title III lawsuits involving digital properties rose by over 300% in recent years.

Companies that can show a documented, repeatable, automated accessibility testing process?

They’re in way better shape legally.
Even if a claim arises, they can demonstrate “reasonable effort”, a key factor in defending accessibility cases.

Proactive beats reactive. Every time.

3. How Does Accessibility Automation Improve the User Experience?

This is the part that too many companies miss:
Accessibility isn’t just about people with disabilities, it improves the entire UX for every user.

Think about it:

• Clearer labels help rushed shoppers on mobile.
  
• Logical tab orders benefit users with broken mice.
  
• Good contrast helps people trying to use your site in sunlight.
  

Accessibility features are usability features. Period.

And in a world where 68% of users abandon sites because of bad experiences?
That’s not charity. That’s smart product design.

Fun fact:
The curb cut, the little sloped sections at sidewalks for wheelchairs?
Originally built for accessibility.
Now used daily by parents with strollers, travelers with suitcases, and workers pushing carts.
Accessibility innovation tends to spill over into mainstream convenience.

4. How Does Inclusive Design Strengthen Brand Loyalty and Reach?

Here’s something not enough businesses calculate:
People with disabilities and their families control over $1.2 trillion in disposable income globally.

When you build experiences that are inclusive by default, not “special cases”, you tap into a massive, loyal, often underserved audience.

Inclusive brands get better word-of-mouth.
They also get a quiet kind of goodwill that marketing budgets can’t buy.

Companies that make accessibility real, not performative, win.
Quietly. Consistently. Compounding over time.

Expert Insights on the Future of Accessibility Testing

If you talk to accessibility experts today, one thing becomes clear fast:
Automation is essential—but alone, it’s nowhere near enough.

A common misconception is that running automated scans covers the majority of WCAG 2.1 criteria. In reality?
Even the best tools, like Axe or Lighthouse, typically detect only 57% of real-world accessibility issues.

The gap isn’t because the tools are bad. It’s because real accessibility problems live in nuance:

• Context of alt text
  
• Logical flow for screen readers
  
• Usability of dynamic interactions
  

None of these can be fully judged by a machine.
Not yet, anyway.

Why Will Human Testing Always Be Essential for Accessibility?

People with disabilities bring something to the table that no AI model can replicate: lived experience.

As Slack’s Accessibility Engineering Lead put it recently:
“You can’t automate empathy. You can automate checks. Both are needed.”

Companies that embed regular usability testing—with real assistive tech users—into their dev cycles catch issues that automation simply can’t see.

It’s not just about WCAG compliance; it’s about reality compliance.

How Is AI Changing the Landscape of Accessibility Testing?

Emerging tools like Kobiton and Evinced are using AI to try and bridge the automation gap.

Some promising advances include:

• Self-healing Appium scripts for mobile flows (Kobiton)
  
• Context-aware alt text generation audits (Evinced)
  
• Dynamic flow modeling to simulate how disabled users move through SPAs (under early development)
  

However, industry leaders like Deque and W3C stress caution:
AI can augment human testers, but can’t replace them for nuanced evaluations.

What Is the Best Approach to Combining Automation and Human Testing?

For now—and probably the next few years—the winning formula looks like this:

1. Automate what can be automated (early, often, everywhere).
   
2. Layer in manual audits for complex flows, content meaning, and real user journeys.
   
3. Keep humans in the loop, especially users from diverse disability communities.
   

Because accessibility isn’t a destination.
It’s a moving target, and the best teams are learning to move with it.

How Softeko Can Help You Build Accessible Digital Products

If you’ve made it this far, you already know: accessibility can’t wait.

The longer teams delay embedding accessibility into development, the harder—and more expensive—it becomes to fix later.
But the good news?
You don’t have to figure it out alone.

At Softeko, we work with development teams every day to integrate accessibility testing into real-world workflows: CI/CD pipelines, automated frameworks, and human-layered audits. Always grounded in WCAG compliance, always centered around real users.

How Can You Claim Your Free Accessibility Audit and Consultation?

Claim your free Accessibility Audit and Consultation with our QA specialists.
We’ll review your current site, flag critical gaps, and map out a practical, affordable improvement plan.

No jargon. No hype. Just honest, actionable advice—to help you build digital experiences that truly include everyone.