Why a once-a-year accessibility audit is not enough

A manual accessibility audit is valuable. It is also a photograph: it shows how the site looked on the days it was tested. Most sites then change every week, with new campaigns, new components, a plugin update or an editor uploading images. Each change can add problems that the audit never saw.

What goes wrong after an audit

• Regressions. A fixed issue returns when a template is rewritten or a design system is updated.
• New content. Images without alternative text, links named "click here", low-contrast banners and uncaptioned videos arrive through the CMS, not through code review.
• Third parties. Cookie banners, chat widgets, payment forms and tag-manager scripts change without a deployment on your side.
• Standards move. The reference for the EAA is moving from WCAG 2.1 to 2.2 (read the details), so last year's pass is not a permanent pass.

What each approach is good at

Check	Annual manual audit	Continuous automated monitoring
Finds judgement issues (meaningful alt text, logical reading order, screen reader flow)	Yes	No
Catches regressions within days	No	Yes
Covers many pages and many sites cheaply	No	Yes
Shows a history you can hand to a client or authority	One data point	A dated trend
Cost per check	High	Low

Automated tools find only part of all issues. Deque, which makes axe-core, reported in 2022 that its automated testing finds 57.38% of issues by volume in its own audit data (a vendor figure, not an independent study). That is exactly why you need both: the machine for breadth and repetition, the human for judgement.

A routine that works

1. Baseline: one manual audit of the key journeys (home, product, cart, checkout, account, contact).
2. Monitor: scheduled scans of the whole site, weekly or daily depending on how often it changes, with alerts when the score drops or a critical issue appears.
3. Guard releases: run the same checks in your pipeline so regressions never reach production (how to set it up).
4. Review by hand when it matters: after redesigns, new checkout steps and every few months for the main flows.
5. Keep the record: dated scans, an issue log and notes from manual checks are what you show a customer or an authority.

WCAGAlert covers steps 2 to 5: scheduled scans, change tracking, guided manual checks and shareable reports. Try a free scan or see the plans.