“I Want My Website to Be Certified as Accessible,” And Why It Can’t Be!

Join hosts Natalie MacLees and Natalie Garza on the 17th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they discuss the misconceptions about website accessibility certifications and why they don’t exist.

Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 17. I’m Natalie G, the host and mic MC. And with me today is

Natalie MacLees: Natalie Mac, accessibility expert.

Natalie Garza: yes, she is an accessibility expert here to answer all our questions. And in today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about, “I wanna get my website or app certified as accessible.” Why can’t we get our website certified as accessible, Natalie?

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, this is something that clients often ask for more often than you might think because they want to have, I think they want two things. I think number one, they wanna have some kind of certification that they can display on the website to say, “Look, my website is accessible.” And then I think the second thing that they’re hoping to get is peace of mind, that nobody is going to be able to sue them or send them a demand letter saying that their website isn’t accessible.

And unfortunately there is no like official accessibility certification. We have talked extensively in other episodes of the podcast and I like all over online, if you could look up information on accessibility. You’ll see WCAG, the web content accessibility guidelines, referred to over and over again.

And those are just a set of guidelines. They’re not a certification scheme in any way, shape or form, and they’re also not comprehensive. So meeting WCAG does not mean that your website is a hundred percent accessible. It’s just a baseline of accessibility. So unfortunately, there is no way to actually certify a website as being accessible.

Natalie Garza: No, because accessibility is not a one-and-done kind of procedure.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, that’s definitely one of the challenges because if, for example, there was some kind of website certification, you would have somebody come in, test your site, certify it as accessible, and then as soon as you went in and made one edit, that would be out the window. You would have to start all over again, and it wouldn’t be cheap, right?

It would be pretty time-consuming and pretty time-intensive. Websites change all the time, and it makes it really hard to have, you know, any report or anything that you do is just a point in time, right? On the day that this report was finished, here’s what the state of accessibility was on the site, but it is not

like a certification of that status, because probably maybe even that later, that same day, something on the website changed, something new was added, something was edited, something was removed, and now those test results are invalid.

Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s like trying to certify a human is healthy,

Natalie MacLees: That’s a good analogy.

Natalie Garza: The next day, they can catch a cold. That certificate goes out the window.

Natalie MacLees: You might cut your finger, you might stub your toe

Natalie Garza: A Gator can bite your hand off.

Natalie MacLees: My goodness!

Natalie Garza: Sorry, Natalie just came back from Louisiana, you guys, Natalie came from Louisiana where she could have gone on the Gator tours, but she decided not to.

Natalie MacLees: Have both my hands, though.

Natalie Garza: Yes.

Natalie MacLees: I did not feed marshmallows...