You’ve taken the steps to have a WCAG audit conducted for your business—ideally against WCAG 2.2 AA, the current recommended standard. You’ve got the results back, with a list of concerns to tackle. So now what?
Once your WCAG audit is complete and all the data is in, it’s time to start taking steps to make the necessary changes to keep your site accessible.
Knowing where to start and how to proceed in an intentional and organized way is key. Let’s go step by step through the process of what to do after your WCAG audit is complete.
Take Quick Action to Immediately Improve Digital Accessibility
Start by reviewing the audit to find the high-visibility issues so you can address these first.
Look for the low-hanging fruit while taking stock of your digital experiences. Accessibility issues on your home page or associated with key tasks like logging in or submitting a contact form are much more likely to present issues for a current user. Key tasks are also more likely to result in legal action than missing alt text on a two-year-old blog post.
Start with the following:
- Your home page, navigation, top user tasks, and header and footer
- Whether or not videos have captions
- If your PDFs are readable with screen readers
A smart early move: prioritize fixes to global elements like your site header, footer, and main navigation. These components appear on every page, so fixing them once improves accessibility across your entire site immediately.
At this point, it's a good idea to consult with an accessibility expert and start conducting WCAG training with your internal teams so that accessibility can stay a top priority.
Building a Remediation Roadmap After Your WCAG Audit
Once you've addressed the most urgent issues identified in your WCAG audit, it's time to build a structured remediation roadmap for everything else.
Use your WCAG accessibility audit report as the foundation. Translate the findings into actionable tickets in your project management system and assign them to the right teams. This keeps remediation efforts organized and creates a paper trail that demonstrates your organization's commitment to accessibility, which can be valuable if legal questions ever arise.
At a minimum, your roadmap should include:
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A prioritized list of remaining issues from your WCAG compliance audit
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Assigned ownership across development, design, and content teams
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Estimated effort levels for each issue
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Target completion dates and milestones
Be realistic about timelines. Some structural or design-level fixes may take several development sprints to resolve, so build in time for QA and user testing with assistive technology users before considering any issue fully closed.
Move to Core Remediation
After the high-risk issues are addressed, it’s time to focus on broader remediation—working toward substantial WCAG 2.2 AA conformance across your digital presence.
At this point, you want to complete all of the recommended issues found in the WCAG compliance audit, while implementing automated and manual testing techniques. Start with the most significant high-barrier issues and work your way down. It is possible that your site will need significant redesigning. Ensure that you verify the remediation with users of assistive technology.
You’ll also want to establish the teams that are responsible for certain issues and integrate reporting into an organized ticket system.
Shift to Maintenance Mode & Monitoring
Once you’ve reached a strong baseline of accessibility, your job still isn’t over. Ongoing accessibility monitoring is essential to maintaining WCAG conformance long-term.
Every release should be assessed to ensure that it doesn’t cause any accessibility issues, and accessibility should be prioritized when you’re developing new features or updates. Having UX personas and Dev standards can help with this. Specifically, you'll want to ensure users of assistive technology are part of your ongoing persona and testing protocols.
We strongly recommend establishing WCAG automated monitoring of your top ten pages and user testing with members of the disability community at regular intervals and/or with each release.
Finally, make sure there’s an easy and direct way for users to report issues.
Need Help Putting Your WCAG Audit Into Action?
Turning audit findings into a substantially accessible, continuously monitored digital presence takes the right support. UsableNet offers solutions for every stage of the journey:
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If you need experts to handle remediation for you, UsableNet Assistive is a fully managed service where our team identifies, fixes, and maintains accessibility across your site—so yours doesn’t have to.
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If you want to build internal accessibility capability with expert guidance, Accessibility as a Service (AaaS) provides your team with audits, training, and strategic support to integrate accessibility into your workflows.
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If your team needs the right tools to find and fix issues independently, the AQA platform gives you automated and guided manual testing, code-level fix recommendations, and real-time progress tracking.
Book a Demo to Discuss Which Option Fits Your Team
Set Up Documentation
Documentation will be an important part of your post-WCAG accessibility audit work period, as it helps your team stay on the same page. It keeps your efforts focused, and it explains to internal and external customers what your plans are for accessibility.
First, draft and publish your accessibility statement. This public-facing document should include the WCAG conformance level you’re targeting (e.g., WCAG 2.2 AA), an honest description of where you are in your conformance journey, contact information including a working phone number and email, and a date of last review. The absence of an accessibility statement—or one with an unresponsive phone number—is explicitly cited in US accessibility lawsuits, so getting this right matters.
Separately, create an internal accessibility policy that defines scope, roles, timelines, KPIs, and reporting cadence. Finally, prepare an executive summary outlining the resources and budget needed to execute the remediation roadmap.
Document all issues, including feedback from user testers, what the issue is, and how it was resolved. It’s important to document verification from users in the disability community; this may offer protection during a lawsuit.
Finally, document internal policies and processes that detail your accessibility efforts.
WCAG Audit FAQs
How long does it take to fix issues found in a WCAG audit?
Timelines vary depending on the scope and severity of issues uncovered. Minor issues like missing alt text or low-contrast text can often be resolved in days, while deeper structural or design-level barriers may require weeks or months of remediation work. For most organizations, reaching a strong baseline of WCAG conformance takes 12–18 months when approached as a structured program — starting with high-severity blockers, then embedding accessibility into ongoing development workflows.
What if we can't fix everything found in our WCAG audit right away?
That's completely normal. Most organizations can't remediate every finding from a WCAG accessibility audit overnight. Prioritize Level A and AA failures, address high-traffic and high-risk pages first, and build out a phased roadmap for the rest. Document your plan and publish an accessibility statement; this shows good faith effort and can provide some legal protection while remediation is ongoing.
How do we handle third-party tools that fail our WCAG audit?
Third-party content and tools are a common challenge after a WCAG audit. Keep in mind that your organization remains responsible for the accessibility of third-party content on your site, regardless of who built it. Start by flagging issues with the relevant vendor and asking about their accessibility roadmap. In the meantime, document the issue and include a note in your accessibility statement. Where possible, evaluate whether an accessible alternative exists. Going forward, consider making WCAG conformance and the current VPAT standard requirements in your vendor contracts.
Digital Accessibility is Never Done
Almost no websites are static, which means that you’re never “done” with digital accessibility. This means that your entire team needs to be informed about accessibility policies and processes and that it should be a core part of what you do.
Ready to put your WCAG audit results into real progress? Schedule a consultation with UsableNet’s accessibility experts to build your remediation roadmap and get to conformance faster.
