clouda11y

Frequently asked questions

Why is it so expensive?

When you calculate the cost of engineering time vs. our subscription price, we think the math will speak for itself. Moreover, it takes time to develop expertise, experience, and to set up the right testing environments, infrastructure, and ecosystem to troubleshoot and resolve issues efficiently. We’re already set up and excited to start tackling fixes for you right away.

What's the difference between this and Axe, Deque, Lighthouse, WebAIM, etc.?

We use those tools and services (among others) to help us find accessbility issues, but they only detect the problems; we contribute fixes. Think of it like going for a vehicle inspection vs. going to the mechanic — we’re both.

Can't I assign it to my engineers or do it myself?

Absolutely! A good UI/frontend engineer is capable of fixing most accessibility issues, and even preventing them in the first place. We highly encourage you to bake accessibility thinking into your processes and build programmatic checks into your pipeline to prevent issues in the first place — we offer coaching and consultation to help achieve that. In our experience, companies of a certain size need subject matter expertise and consistent focus to keep their products free of issues. We also tackle trickier or thornier problems that may involve engineering, product, and design roles.

What's the difference between a "scan" and an "audit"?

A scan programmatically checks your site to detect accessibility issues. The generally accepted stat is that only 20–30% of accessibility issues are programmatically detectable — although industry giant, Deque, claims 57%. An audit involves a deeper manual review of interactivity, compatibility with accessibility utilities like screen readers, and wholistic consideration of the end-to-end customer experience.

How is a "fix" counted?

An issue is a specific violation of a WCAG Success Criterion, we define a fix as one patch to address an issue with a common “root cause”. For example, if we detect 30 violation of WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.3 (Level AA) on one of your pages (don’t be embarassed, it’s very common). We don’t count each instance of the issue as a “fix”. If half are caused by a style applied to list items and the other half by a style applied to links in your footer, we’ll find and fix 2 issues for you. Obviously, this is a toy example to illustrate the point; we’re more interested in helping you achieve your goals than obsessing about the exact count. Our “fix limits” are SWAG’s that are there to keep us sustainable.

What if I've already run an audit?

Awesome! You’ve already taken the first big step toward providing a more accessible experience for your customers. You might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of issues detected and/or don’t know where to start. We’ll help formulate a plan, set milestones, and apply fixes while you track our progress on our dashboard.

What if I already have a (fairly) recent VPAT?

Amazing! We can review the VPAT for outstanding issues and help address them as part of your accessibility roadmap. We bet you put in a lot of concerted effort to reach this point, but the remaining issues might be the hardest to fix; we can provide consultation to point your engineers in the right direction or contribute fixes ourselves.

What if I need to renew a VPAT?

We understand renewing your VPAT can feel like a chore, but we’ll help you get there faster and with more confidence. Actually, on the topic of renewal… we think the whole concept of a VPAT frames accessibility as a point-in-time project or exercise that needs to “get done” — which is just wrong. We believe assessing accessibility should be continuous and should be renewed with every release. Crazy, right? Hear us out… we want to introduce you to the idea of a “rolling VPAT” that allows you to keep your accessibility statement fresh and up-to-date with every release, every month, or every quarter. With our “Scan & fix” option, you can update your VPAT to more accurately reflect the accessibility of your product so it never grows stale.

How do you apply fixes and make code changes?

You grant our team access to relevant source code so we can submit PR’s for you to review and merge. If you don’t use git for version control, we can write the fixes as an overlay — although this is far less efficient. We won’t directly modify unversioned code in Shopify, Webflow, or similar low-code solutions. Let us know if you have an unusual set up or environment, we’ll try our best to accommodate.

How can I track progress?

Once you subscribe, you’ll have access to our dashboard where you can see and update a task queue, run scans, track progress, set milestones, ask questions, and make product or design decisions.

Can I cancel my subscription?

Of course. You can cancel at any time with just a few clicks on our dashboard.