The Accessibility Gap: Why Compliance Alone Isn’t Enough

How enterprises confuse “scan-based compliance” with true accessibility and why real-user validation is critical.

The “Green Checkmark” Illusion

Imagine a familiar moment in a modern product team: a release is approaching, the CI/CD pipeline runs, automated accessibility tests pass, and the dashboard lights up green. The Product Manager signs off, confident the experience is ADA/EAA-compliant.

The next day, a visually impaired user logs into their bank account to check their balance. They navigate to “View balance” with a screen reader, press Enter, and the interface goes silent. Focus disappears. No feedback. No confirmation.

A simple task becomes a moment of frustration and uncertainty.

This is the Accessibility Gap. It is the difference between technical compliance, satisfying a list of code rules, and functional usability, creating an experience that works for humans. For too long, enterprises have treated accessibility as a legal box-checking exercise, emphasizing risk mitigation while neglecting the actual user experience of their products.

The Limits of Automation

To understand the gap, we must first be honest about our tools. Automated accessibility scanners, such as Google Lighthouse and Deque’s Axe, are indispensable for developer velocity, but they are severely limited in scope.

Industry consensus, supported by data from major accessibility firms like Deque Systems, suggests that automated tools can detect only 30% to 50% of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) violations.

Why such a low number? Because scanners parse code, not context.

• Context Blindness: A scanner can verify that an image has an alt attribute. However, it cannot tell you whether alt="image_123_v2_final_final" provides meaningful context to a user or is just noise.
• Workflow Logic: Automation cannot judge if a focus order follows a logical, intuitive path. It only checks if focusable elements exist.
• Dynamic States: Single Page Applications often fail in the “in-between” states, with notifications and error messages that appear without alerting screen readers, or modals that trap keyboard focus on the background page.

Reliance on “Compliance Theater”, including the use of overlay widgets that promise instant fixes, often exacerbates this issue by masking underlying code problems rather than addressing the actual usability obstacles.

Without manual management of ARIA Live Regions and Keyboard Focus, these “in-between” states are invisible and unusable for assistive technology users.

Defining the Gap: Compliance vs. Usability

The Accessibility Gap is where the “letter of the law” diverges from the “spirit of the user experience”.

Consider a “Keyboard Trap”. A website might be technically compliant because every element has a label. However, if a user navigates to a calendar widget and requires 400 keystrokes to exit it because the “Close” button is placed last in the DOM, the site is effectively broken.

It is compliant, but it is practically unusable for users that rely on screen readers to navigate web pages.

The cost of this gap is measurable:

• Revenue Leakage: In the UK alone, the spending power of disabled households is estimated at over £274 billion, while in the US it is nearly $21 billion. If your checkout is “compliant” but annoying, that money goes to a competitor.
• Brand Integrity: In the age of social media, a user blocked from a service due to poor accessibility will voice their frustration. “We passed the audit” may keep an organization from fines, but it is a poor defense in the court of public opinion.

Bridging the Gap: The Case for Real-User Validation

If automation is the floor, human validation is the ceiling. To bridge the gap, product teams must integrate two distinct layers of testing:

• Manual Audits: This involves QA professionals evaluating critical paths using the actual assistive technologies your customers use, like NVDA or JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on iOS, and TalkBack on Android. These auditors understand the nuance of interaction specifications that a script misses.
• Native User Testing: This is the gold standard. Testing with people who live with disabilities provides insights that no emulator can match. A native screen reader user navigates the web at high speeds, using rotor menus and shortcuts that developers rarely know exist. If your product works for them, it works.

The Strategic Shift: Promoting QA in the Product Lifecycle

For Product Managers, closing the accessibility gap requires transforming “Quality Assurance” from a final gatekeeper into a strategic partner embedded in early stages of development.

• QA at the Source (Shift Left): QA involvement can begin at conception, not as a conclusion. Test engineers should review PRDs and Design files alongside developers. By defining acceptance criteria and flagging accessibility risks during the wireframe phase, QA prevents costly architectural barriers that are difficult to fix during user acceptance testing.
• Empowered Testing: Automation should be deployed as a force multiplier for the QA team, not a replacement. By implementing local linters to catch errors (such as missing labels) automatically, you empower your QA teams to dedicate their expertise to high-value “human” testing, validating complex logic, managing screen reader focus, and navigating flows that scripts cannot assess.
• Quality-Driven Metrics: Shift the focus to “Task Success Rate” for Assistive Technology users. Can a screen reader user complete the signup flow as efficiently as a sighted user? This user-centric metric, driven and validated by QA, is the accurate measure of product quality.

Conclusion: Accessibility is Product Excellence

Ultimately, the goal is not to avoid a lawsuit. The goal is to build a superior and usable product. When we address the “Accessibility Gap”, we often improve the experience for everyone with more explicit error messages, better keyboard navigation, and higher contrast, benefiting all users, not just those with disabilities.

Compliance gets you to the starting line. True accessibility gets you to the finish.