How Much Accessibility Testing Should You Automate?

The digital landscape is shifting faster than ever. If you’re a technology leader, you’re under constant pressure to ship features, stay ahead of the competition, and, ideally, ensure your products are accessible to everyone.

Automated accessibility testing tools have overtaken the market, promising to streamline compliance and catch issues early. But as these tools become more sophisticated, a critical question emerges: How much accessibility testing should you automate, and where do you still need human analysis?

Despite the recent progress in accessibility testing and the rise of regulation enforcement, a staggering 94.8% of homepages still have detectable WCAG 2 failures in 2025. Automation is powerful, but it’s not delivering widespread solutions that disabled users deserve.

The real challenge is finding the right balance of leveraging automation for speed and coverage, while relying on manual testing for depth of consideration and real-world accuracy.

What Automated Accessibility Testing Can Do Well

Automated accessibility testing tools serve as an excellent starting point in ensuring your platform’s compliance with current regulations. They excel at running instant checks for surface-level issues and can scan thousands of pages in minutes, which is something that no manual tester could achieve at scale.

Common issues caught by automation include:

• ARIA roles and attributes
• Color contrast ratios
• Missing alt text for images
• Label associations for form fields

These tools are particularly effective for:

• Regression testing in CI/CD pipelines
• Quick scans during development sprints
• Detecting early onset issues

Tool Comparison Table

Automated tools like Axe, Lighthouse, and WAVE are trusted by teams worldwide. They integrate seamlessly into developer workflows, provide actionable reports, and help maintain a baseline of accessibility compliance.

However, even the best tools have their limits.

Where Automation Falls Short

Automation can scan for code-level errors, but it can’t simulate how real users interact with your product. And with full-scale usability on the line, including human-centric reviews can’t be cut from the process.

Limitations of automation:

• Keyboard navigation: Automation can check for focusable elements, but it often misses focus traps or hidden content that trips up keyboard users.
  
  
• Screen reader experience: Tools can verify if ARIA labels exist, but they can’t determine if the announced information makes sense in context or is presented in the correct order.
  
  
• Cognitive load and clarity: Automated tests can’t assess whether instructions are clear, language is simple, or if the interface is overwhelming.
  
  
• Visual design nuances: Proximity, grouping, and visual cues that help users understand relationships between elements are beyond automation’s reach.

A study published in 2019 by Nucleus Research found that more than 70% of internet sites are inaccessible, particularly to users who rely upon screen readers to navigate online platforms. That gap costs online retailers a $6.9 billion annual revenue loss, impacted in part by blind users abandoning carts, calling customer service lines, and choosing more accessible competitors regularly.

Automation may be essential for scale, but it’s not a substitute for human insight. This is especially true for complex, dynamic, or highly interactive user experiences.

Manual Testing: When Human Insight Matters

Manual accessibility testing is the only way to truly understand how disabled people interact with your product. If human testers are familiar with real-life disabilities and share lived disability experiences, all the better.

Manual testing excels at:

• Simulating real-world usage scenarios (for example, using a screen reader or navigating only by keyboard)
• Testing dynamic content, modals, and pop-ups
• Validating logical reading and tab order
• Evaluating accessible language, mental load, and overall usability

Pro Tip: Pair manual testing with user personas—such as blind, dyslexic, or motor-impaired users—to ensure you’re covering a broad spectrum of needs.

Says Lindsay Holley, Aspiritech’s VP of Product Strategy, “Accessibility testing is subjective and requires human experience, judgment, and interpretation, whereas automated testing leans on requirements and rules and often does not test the more subjective standards.”

Manual audits can uncover issues that automation will never catch, like confusing error messages, inaccessible custom widgets, or misleading link text. With human detection and intervention, your platform can move from compliance to true usability and inclusion.

Best Practices for a Balanced Approach

So, how do you get the best of both worlds? Here’s a proven roadmap:

• Start with automation for early detection: Integrate automated tests into your development pipeline to catch common issues as code is written.
  
  
• Schedule periodic manual audits, especially during pre-launch: Before major releases, conduct thorough manual reviews to catch deeper usability barriers.
  
  
• Include accessibility in quality assurance (QA) cycles, not just design: Make accessibility a core part of your testing process, not an afterthought.
  
  
• Train QA teams and developers on assistive tech use: Empower your team to use screen readers, keyboard navigation, and other assistive tools.
  
  
• Document and prioritize issues based on impact: Not all accessibility issues are equal. Focus on those that create the biggest barriers for users.

Addressing just six common issues would resolve 96% of automatically detected accessibility errors across the web. At every opportunity, be on the lookout for and ready to correct low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language.

As Casey Parker, a Senior Accessibility Strategist at Aspiritech, says, “It's more cost effective to implement accessibility as something is being created rather than doing it at the end of the build.”

The Accessibility-SEO Connection

It’s not just about compliance. Accessibility improvements often go hand-in-hand with better SEO and user experience. Clear headings, descriptive alt text, readable fonts, and mobile-friendliness all help your site rank higher and serve more users. In fact, a study by Semrush found 73.4% of websites saw increased traffic after implementing accessibility solutions, with many experiencing a 12% average boost in organic traffic.

Increased traffic, expanded reach, and the likelihood of every potential client or customer—regardless of ability—to learn about your business, access your services, or purchase your products? Those are excellent reasons for implementing human-driven accessibility testing. It’s also the right thing to do.

Conclusion

Automated accessibility testing is a game-changer for speed, consistency, and coverage. But it’s only half the story. True accessibility and inclusion require a human lens. By combining automation with thoughtful manual testing, you can move beyond checklists to create digital experiences that work well for everyone.

Speed and compliance can coexist when tools and teams work together. If you’re ready to integrate accessibility testing into your business’s QA process, it’s the perfect time to reach out to Aspiritech.

Our trained team of Section 508 testers certified by the Department of Homeland Security are ready to help.

Accessibility Case Study

SourceAmerica needed a team to test a new online portal.