Glossary Terms

Accessibility Audit

An accessibility audit is a structured evaluation of a website or app against a standard like WCAG, combining automated scanning, manual testing, and real assistive technology use to find and document barriers.

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Accessibility Center of Excellence

A centralized internal team or function responsible for setting accessibility standards, providing expertise, and coordinating accessibility practice across an organization's various product and content teams.

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Accessibility Certification Program

A structured internal or third-party program that trains staff and validates their accessibility knowledge and skills, often as part of building organization-wide accessibility capability.

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Accessibility Champion

A designated individual within a design, product, or engineering team who advocates for accessibility, answers questions, and helps embed accessible practice into that team's daily work.

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Accessibility Checklist

An accessibility checklist is a condensed, actionable list of common requirements, usually drawn from WCAG, used by designers and developers as a practical reference during day-to-day work.

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Accessibility Conformance Testing

Accessibility conformance testing is the formal process of verifying, criterion by criterion, whether a product meets a named standard, typically to produce a VPAT or ACR for procurement purposes.

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Accessibility Debt

The accumulated backlog of unresolved accessibility issues in a product, analogous to technical debt, that grows more expensive and disruptive to fix the longer it is left unaddressed.

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Accessibility Gap Analysis

An accessibility gap analysis compares an organization's current state against a target standard or maturity level, identifying specifically where the gaps are, in technical conformance, process, and team skill, before a remediation or roadmap plan is built.

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Accessibility Insights

A free accessibility testing tool suite from Microsoft, offering both a guided manual-testing workflow and an automated scanner for web and Windows applications.

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Accessibility Linting

Running automated accessibility rules directly inside a code editor or build process, flagging likely WCAG violations, like a missing alt attribute, as code is written rather than after deployment.

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Accessibility Maturity Model

An accessibility maturity model is a framework describing stages an organization moves through, from no formal accessibility practice to reactive fixing to proactive, embedded accessibility built into every stage of the product lifecycle.

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Accessibility Monitoring

Accessibility monitoring is the ongoing practice of regularly checking a site for new accessibility issues after an initial audit and remediation, since new content and features can reintroduce problems over time.

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Accessibility Overlay

An accessibility overlay is a third-party script added to a website that claims to automatically detect and fix accessibility issues, typically through a small on-page widget.

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Accessibility Remediation

Accessibility remediation is the process of actually fixing the barriers an audit identifies, from code-level changes like adding missing labels to broader work like restructuring page semantics or rebuilding a custom component.

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Accessibility Roadmap

An accessibility roadmap is a prioritized, time-bound plan for fixing an organization's accessibility issues and building lasting accessibility practices, typically built from an initial audit's findings.

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Accessibility ROI (Return on Investment)

Accessibility ROI refers to the measurable business value of accessibility work, spanning avoided legal costs, expanded market reach, improved SEO, and better usability for all users, not disabled users alone.

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Accessibility Scanner

An accessibility scanner is a specific automated tool, such as axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse, or a full-site crawler, that checks a page's underlying code against a rule set derived from WCAG and reports what it finds.

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Accessibility Statement

An accessibility statement is a public page describing an organization's accessibility commitment, the standard it targets, known limitations, and how to report a barrier or request an accommodation.

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Accessibility Training

Accessibility training teaches designers, developers, content writers, and QA staff how to build and check for accessibility as part of their normal workflow, rather than leaving it to a single specialist or an outside audit alone.

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Accessibility Tree

The accessibility tree is the browser's internal representation of a page built specifically for assistive technology, containing each element's role, accessible name, state, and value, derived from the DOM and any ARIA attributes present.

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