Should you use automated tools or hire a firm for an accessibility audit?
Automated tools and audit firms answer different questions, so the choice depends on what you need to know. Automated checkers reliably find the problems that can be measured (contrast, missing labels, target size) across many pages for little money, but they cannot settle the parts of WCAG that need judgement. A firm brings that judgement and the experience of assistive technology, at a price and on a schedule. For most product teams the practical answer is a tool that measures everything it can and shows the evidence, with a person (yours or a firm’s) deciding the rest.
Every team that takes accessibility seriously reaches the same fork. A free checker says the page has nine errors. A firm quotes a number with a comma in it. Both are telling the truth, and neither is telling you the whole of it.
1. What automated testing settles well
Some of WCAG is arithmetic. Colour contrast is a ratio. A form field either has a label or it does not. A control is either 24 by 24 pixels or it is not. A page either has a title or it is empty. Software checks these faster and more consistently than any person, and it checks them on every page rather than a sample.
That consistency matters in a way that is easy to undervalue. An automated check gives the same answer on Monday as on Friday, before a release and after it. It is how a team notices that a redesign quietly dropped the contrast on hint text, without waiting for the next annual review.
2. What it cannot settle, honestly stated
The rest of WCAG asks about meaning, and software is poor at meaning. Does the alt text describe the photograph? Does the link text say where the link goes? Is the reading order the order that makes sense? Does the error message tell someone how to fix the mistake? Each of these can be checked quickly by a person with the evidence in front of them and cannot be decided by looking at the code alone.
There is a widely quoted estimate that automated tools find somewhere between a quarter and a half of accessibility problems, depending on who is counting and what counts as a problem. Treat it as a rough guide, not a measurement. The useful point is the shape of it: automated testing finds a lot, it does not find everything, and the things it misses are not minor. A tool that reports a page as clean after automated checks alone is reporting that it found nothing, which is not the same thing.
3. What a firm brings
An accessibility firm brings people who use screen readers, voice control and switch devices every day, and who have seen the same mistakes on a thousand other sites. They can test a journey end to end. They can tell you that a pattern technically passes and is still unusable. They can read your product’s context and say whether a workaround counts. If you are facing a legal complaint, a large public tender or a first audit of a complex application, that experience is worth paying for.
The limits are practical rather than about quality. A firm audits a sample, on a date, and the report ages the moment the product changes. The cost means most teams do it once a year at most. And the findings arrive as a document, which someone then has to turn into tickets, verify, and reconcile with the next audit.
4. Free checkers, audit firms and paid platforms
The three kinds of help differ most in what they leave with you afterwards.
- Free checkers run automated tests on one page and show the results on screen. Good for a first look and for catching regressions on a single page. They usually keep nothing, test nothing behind a sign-in, and cannot compare pages, so criteria that are about consistency across a site are out of reach. Dreven’s own free accessibility checker is this kind of tool, and says so.
- Audit firms test a sample by hand and by tool, and deliver a report with their judgement in it. You get expertise and a signed opinion. You do not get a living record, and the next audit starts from a blank page.
- Paid audit platforms run the automated tests across many pages, keep the evidence, and give a person somewhere to record decisions on the criteria the tests could not settle. The useful ones say plainly which results were measured and which were decided by a person. The ones to avoid treat automated passes as conformance, or quietly count the undecided checks as passes to make a score look good.
The difference between a free checker and a platform is not the number of checks. It is the evidence, the scope and the place for a person’s decision.
5. Choosing for your situation
If you have one public page and want to know whether it is obviously broken, use a free checker today. If you are facing a complaint, a tender or an application with complex interactions, hire a firm, and ask them for evidence behind every row of their report so that you can re-test it yourself later. What a good accessibility audit report includes is a fair checklist to hold them to.
If you are a product team that ships every week and needs to answer buyers more than once a year, you need both halves: automated measurement across your pages, and a repeatable way for a person to decide the rest and sign. That person can be on your team, or at a firm you bring in for the judgement calls; either way, the tool should be gathering the evidence so that their time goes on deciding rather than looking.
6. The question to ask any of them
Whichever you choose, ask one question: for each result, how do you know? A good automated tool answers with evidence it kept. A good firm answers with a tester’s notes and a recording. A good platform answers with both and names which is which. Anyone who answers with a score has not understood the question.
7. Questions people ask
Should I use automated tools or hire a firm for an accessibility audit?
Use both, for different parts of the job. Automated tools measure what can be measured across every page, cheaply and repeatably. A firm brings judgement and assistive-technology experience for the criteria software cannot settle. A tool that keeps evidence and routes the undecided results to a person gives you most of what a firm does on the measurable half, and makes the firm’s time count on the other half.
How accurate are automated WCAG checkers compared with manual testing?
On the criteria that can be measured, such as contrast, labels and target size, automated checks are consistent and usually more thorough than a person, because they look at every page. On the criteria that need judgement, such as whether alt text is meaningful, they cannot give a reliable answer at all. Automated testing on its own does not show that a site conforms.
What is the difference between free WCAG checkers and paid audit platforms?
A free checker runs automated tests on one page and shows a result. A paid platform runs them across many pages, keeps the evidence behind each result, compares pages for criteria about consistency, and gives a person a place to decide the results software cannot settle and to produce a report. The number of checks is not the difference; the evidence and the human decision are.
Can an automated tool make my website WCAG compliant?
No. A tool can find problems and gather evidence. People fix the problems in the site’s own code, and a person decides the criteria that need judgement. Be cautious of any product that promises compliance from a scan or from a script added to the page.
8. Where Dreven fits
Dreven is built on the honest version of this answer. It checks your site’s pages against WCAG 2.2 (or 2.1, Section 508 or EN 301 549), keeps the evidence behind every result, and marks a result “can’t tell” rather than guessing when the tests cannot settle it. Those results come to a person with the evidence beside them, and the report stays a draft until that person has decided and signed. See what a website accessibility audit covers.