Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing so that people with different abilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with a website. It is not a feature added at the end of a project. It is a standard for how the experience is designed and built, and it is evaluated against WCAG 2.2 Level AA rather than asserted in a footer badge.
conformance level every assessment is scoped against
principles the criteria are organized under
stages from evaluation through ongoing monitoring
years building and maintaining websites in Riverside
Selected clients
A selection of the specialists who lead and shape this work, supported by a broader multidisciplinary team.
Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites so people with different abilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with them. That covers people using screen readers, people navigating by keyboard rather than a mouse, people who need adequate contrast or larger text, people with motor differences who need generous targets and forgiving interactions, people who benefit from clear structure and plain language, and people who rely on captions or transcripts. These are not edge cases. They are a substantial share of every audience a website is built for.
Accessibility is not a feature added at the end of a project. It is a standard for how the experience is designed and built. Typography, contrast, hierarchy, navigation, interaction patterns, and component choices made during design either support accessibility or undermine it before a single line of markup exists. Correct HTML structure and interaction behavior then supply the information assistive technology depends on: what a region is, what a control does, what state it is in, and what happens when it is activated. Neither of those can be recovered by a script applied afterward.
We scope the work against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, which is the reference most organizations, procurement processes, and internal standards use. WCAG describes what accessible content looks like in testable terms. It does not determine legal obligations, and we do not offer legal opinions or certification. What we do is evaluate, test with automation and human judgment together, prioritize what actually blocks people, remediate design, content, markup, and component behavior, retest, and put practices in place so the site does not quietly regress as it changes.
Accessibility is decided in design and development, then confirmed by testing.
We are platform-independent. Tooling is chosen per engagement, and every account is client-owned.
axe DevTools
WAVE
Lighthouse
Pa11y
IBM Equal Access
NVDA
JAWS
VoiceOver
TalkBack
WCAG 2.2WAI ARIA Authoring Practices
HTML Living Standard
WordPress
Shopify
WebflowEight failure patterns we see repeatedly, and what we change about each.
If none of these describe the situation, we will say so before a proposal is written.
Public facing organizations that have adopted an internal accessibility standard and need the website assessed against WCAG 2.2 Level AA with findings they can act on.
Procurement, education, healthcare, and public sector buyers increasingly ask for an accessibility statement or conformance report before a contract is signed.
A redesign or replatform is the least expensive moment to get accessibility right, because the templates and components are being decided rather than retrofitted.
A tool produced a long report, most of it is duplicated across templates, and nobody has separated what genuinely blocks people from what is noise.
Custom dropdowns, modals, tabs, filters, and carousels built for visual behavior often lack the keyboard and screen reader behavior the equivalent native elements provide.
An overlay script was installed, the underlying markup was never changed, and the experience for people using assistive technology did not improve.
Most accessibility barriers are created long before anyone opens a testing tool. A color pair chosen for a brand palette, a heading used because it was the right size, a custom dropdown built for a visual effect, a form that reports errors only in red, a carousel that moves on its own: each of these is a design or development decision, and each one is far cheaper to get right than to remediate. So we treat accessibility as part of how the work is designed and built rather than as a phase after it. When we are brought into an existing site instead, we start with the shared templates and components, because that is where a single correction resolves the same barrier across every page that uses it.
Accessibility and usability overlap more than the industry admits. Clear structure, visible focus, understandable labels, honest error messages, and generous targets make a site easier for everyone, not only for people using assistive technology.
Fig. 02
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines organize their testable criteria under four principles. Content should be perceivable, interfaces should be operable, information and behavior should be understandable, and markup should be robust enough for assistive technology to interpret reliably. Level AA is the criteria set most organizations work toward.
Conformance is assessed per page and per flow, not held permanently by a site.
A technical standard describes accessible content. It does not determine legal obligations.
Six stages, run in order. Measurement design is agreed before any budget is committed.
Scoped per engagement. Most programs use four or five of the capabilities below.
A structured evaluation of templates, components, content, and key flows against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, combining automated scanning, manual technical review, and assistive technology testing.
Findings organized by severity, frequency, affected experience, and implementation effort, mapped to the template or component that owns them rather than listed page by page.
Regions, landmarks, headings, lists, tables, and controls expressed with the elements that already carry meaning, so assistive technology receives structure rather than styled divs.
A heading outline that reflects the actual content, one page level heading, no levels skipped for visual effect, and a structure a screen reader user can navigate by.
Every interactive element reachable and operable by keyboard, in a logical order, with no traps, plus a skip link and predictable behavior inside menus, modals, and custom widgets.
Focus indicators that are visible against every background they appear on, designed deliberately rather than removed for aesthetics or left at a browser default that disappears.
Text, interface components, and graphical objects checked against contrast thresholds across every state, including hover, disabled, placeholder, and text over imagery.
Type sizes, line length, spacing, and text resizing and reflow behavior reviewed so content stays readable at high zoom and on small screens without horizontal scrolling.
Alternative text that describes what an image conveys in context, decorative images marked as decorative, and guidance so editors can write descriptions without a developer.
Programmatically associated labels, grouped fields, described requirements, inline validation that is announced, and error messages that explain how to correct the problem.
Link and button text that makes sense out of context, consistent navigation across templates, and page titles that identify where a person actually is.
Native elements used first, ARIA applied only where a native equivalent does not exist, and names, roles, states, and expected keyboard interaction implemented and verified.
Captions for prerecorded video, transcripts for audio, controls that are operable, no unexpected autoplay, and media that does not depend on hearing or sight alone.
Touch targets sized and spaced for real hands, responsive behavior verified on devices, orientation not locked, and interactions that depend on drag or hover given alternatives.
Animation, parallax, and auto advancing content reviewed against reduced motion preferences, with movement that can be paused, stopped, or avoided entirely.
Flows exercised with screen readers and keyboard only navigation to confirm what is announced, in what order, and whether the experience is genuinely understandable.
Remediation carried out in design, content, markup, and component behavior, then retested, with guidance so publishing and future releases do not reintroduce the same issues.
Fig. 03
Design, build, test, remediate, validate, monitor. Websites change constantly, and new pages, content, plugins, integrations, and components can introduce barriers long after a clean assessment. Accessibility is maintained rather than achieved once.
Most new issues arrive through routine publishing, not through redesigns.
Testing at the moment of change costs a fraction of remediating a year of accumulation.
Before you commission a full audit
Send us a handful of representative pages and the templates behind them. We will run automated and manual testing, tell you which barriers are real, and show what remediation would take. No overlay, no compliance badge.
03
A website is not a brochure. It is where every other discipline converges, built for speed, search, accessibility, and the conversion required to justify the media above it.
OctoClean
Franchises. Web.
OctoClean needed to grow its franchise network, but its website was not reaching or educating prospective business owners. Candidates had to understand the opportunity, the support behind it, and what set the model apart from other commercial cleaning franchises.
Increase in website traffic during the engagement
MonkeySports had to serve two businesses at once: a growing network of retail stores and three specialized online shops, each with a deep catalog of its own. The flagship site had to tie the brand together and still send shoppers in store.
Retail and e-commerce | Web
4
Connected websites in one ecosystem
Retail and e-commerce
Web
MonkeySports
Writing from the team running this work, published as the field changes.
Web accessibility means designing and building a website so people with different abilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with it. It is a standard for how the site is built, not a feature added at the end.
WCAG 2.2 is the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It defines testable criteria under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Level AA is the middle WCAG conformance level and the one most organizations target. It covers the criteria that address the most common barriers, such as contrast, keyboard access, visible focus, labels, and text alternatives.
WCAG is a technical standard for accessible web content. The ADA is a civil rights law. WCAG Level AA is widely used as the practical benchmark for accessibility work, but conformance with a standard is not a legal determination. Legal questions belong with counsel.
No. We are not a law firm and we do not provide legal opinions or certification. We evaluate against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, remediate what we find, retest, and document the work. Legal compliance questions belong with qualified counsel.
Usually yes. Most barriers live in shared templates and components, so fixing those in place resolves issues across the whole site. A rebuild is only the better answer when the existing markup or component library makes correct structure and keyboard behavior impractical.
No. Overlays and widgets sit on top of a site and cannot supply meaning that is missing from the markup or fix component behavior. They can also interfere with the assistive technology people already use. The fix belongs in the design, content, and code.
With a combination of automated scanning, manual technical review, and behavioral testing: keyboard navigation, focus order, screen reader checks, high zoom, and real device testing. Automation alone catches only part of the picture.
No. Automated tools detect technical patterns but cannot judge meaning, clarity, or usability. A clean automated scan is not evidence that a site is accessible.
They overlap. Semantic markup, real heading hierarchy, descriptive link text, alt text, captions, and clear navigation support both accessibility and discoverability. Accessibility is not a direct ranking shortcut.
Test at baseline, then as part of releasing new templates or components, with a lighter quarterly review of key flows and a fuller review annually or after a redesign or platform change. Most new issues arrive through routine publishing.
Web accessibility
Send us the site and the templates behind it. We will evaluate it against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, tell you which findings actually block people, and show what remediation would involve. We will not tell you we can make you legally compliant, because no agency can.
Call (800) 505-7570. Building and maintaining websites since 1998.
