Most software companies ship code multiple times a day. Most accessibility audits happen once or twice a year. That gap, between how fast you ship and how often you check, is where accessibility failures live.
It's not that companies don't care. We've talked to over 50 companies since starting Workback, and the pattern is consistent: there are people with accessibility expertise inside these organizations. People who genuinely care. Internal champions who bring it up in planning meetings and want to fix things.
So why aren't their products accessible?
The problem is structural. The tools and processes the industry relies on were designed for a world where software shipped in annual releases, not continuous deployments. Accessibility has different phases, auditing, remediation, certification, each handled by different vendors, mostly manual. Coordinating between consultancies takes quarters. That slog makes it nearly impossible for champions to move the needle. Everyone's stressed: engineers, PMs, legal. And in the middle of it all, the user is forgotten.
The compliance landscape is shifting
Three regulatory forces are converging:
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) took effect in June 2025, requiring digital products and services sold in the EU to meet accessibility standards. This isn't limited to European companies. Any company selling to EU customers or institutions needs to comply.
ADA enforcement in the United States continues to expand to digital properties. Federal courts have consistently held that websites and mobile apps are places of public accommodation under Title III. The number of accessibility-related lawsuits has grown every year for the past decade.
Procurement requirements are the most immediate pressure for many companies. Government agencies, universities, and large enterprises increasingly require VPAT documentation and demonstrated WCAG conformance as a condition of procurement. If you can't prove your product is accessible, you can't sell it to these buyers.
The direction is clear: accessibility compliance is becoming a hard requirement, not a soft preference. And the bar is rising from "we did an audit" to "we can demonstrate ongoing conformance."
Why annual audits aren't enough
Traditional accessibility audits are thorough, expert-driven assessments. A good auditor brings deep knowledge of assistive technology, real-world user behavior, and WCAG interpretation. That expertise is valuable and irreplaceable for certain types of evaluation.
But annual audits have a fundamental timing problem.
Between audits, your product changes. Features are added, redesigned, or removed. Components are refactored. Dependencies are updated. Every change is an opportunity for new accessibility barriers to be introduced.
A team that deploys daily accumulates roughly 250 deployments between annual audits. That's 250 opportunities for regressions to slip in unnoticed. By the time the next audit catches them, users with disabilities have been affected for months.
This is the compliance gap: the distance between your last audit and your current product state. For companies that ship frequently, this gap is almost always large.
Automation alone isn't the answer
Automated accessibility scanners have been around for years. Tools like axe, Lighthouse, and WAVE can catch certain categories of issues: missing alt text, insufficient color contrast, missing form labels. They're useful as a first pass.
But automated scanners only cover about 30-40% of WCAG criteria. The rest require human judgment: Is this alt text meaningful? Does this interaction make sense with a screen reader? Can a keyboard user complete this workflow without getting trapped?
This is where the industry has been stuck. Automated tools catch the easy stuff. Human auditors catch everything else but can't keep up with the pace of development. Most companies end up with a mix of both that still leaves significant gaps.
What continuous compliance looks like
The missing piece isn't better scanners or more frequent audits. It's a different model entirely: one that combines the depth of human-level evaluation with the frequency of automated testing.
At Workback, we're building this with AI agents that can do what scanners can't: navigate applications like real users, understand the intent behind interface elements, evaluate interactions in context, and determine whether an experience is genuinely accessible, not just technically compliant.
The difference between a scanner and an agent is the difference between checking if an image has an alt attribute and checking if that alt text actually describes what's in the image. Between verifying that a button exists and verifying that a keyboard user can reach it, activate it, and understand what happened.
When these evaluations run on every deployment rather than once a year, the compliance gap shrinks from months to hours. Issues are caught before they reach users. Fixes are delivered while the code is still fresh in the developer's mind.
The cost of waiting
If you're reading this and thinking "we'll get to it," consider the compounding cost of delay:
- Legal exposure grows with every day your product is non-compliant under applicable regulations
- Lost revenue accumulates as procurement deals stall on missing VPAT documentation
- Technical debt compounds as accessibility fixes become harder the longer the non-compliant code stays in production
- User harm continues for people with disabilities who can't use your product
Accessibility compliance isn't a project with a finish line. It's a capability you build into your development process. The sooner you start, the smaller the gap.
If your team is navigating this transition, we'd like to help.