Your automated accessibility scan reports zero issues. Legal asks whether the product is compliant. What is your answer?

What the interviewer is testing

Whether you know the limits of automated accessibility tooling, and whether you will state them plainly to a stakeholder who wants a yes.

The answer

No — a clean automated scan is not compliance. Automated tooling detects roughly a third of the issues in the standards. A clean report means the machine-checkable subset passes.

What automation catches well: missing alternative text, insufficient colour contrast, absent form labels, invalid ARIA usage, missing document structure and landmarks.

What it cannot judge:

• Whether alternative text is meaningful — alt="image1" passes
• Whether focus order is logical
• Whether a custom component behaves sensibly with a screen reader
• Whether an error message actually explains the problem
• Whether the interface is operable by keyboard alone in practice
• Whether video captions are accurate

What compliance actually requires

Manual keyboard testing of every journey — the fastest high-value manual check available. Screen reader testing with real assistive technology on critical paths. Testing with disabled users where the product warrants it, which finds things no checklist does. And an accessibility statement and audit against the relevant conformance level, which is what a regulator or procurement process asks for.

Where the leverage actually is

Earlier than testing. Accessible component library and design system primitives make correct behaviour the default across every product built on them — a far better investment than auditing each application afterwards.

The single most common source of failures is a custom interactive control rebuilt from generic elements without the keyboard handling and semantics the native one had. Using the native element, or a well-tested library component, eliminates most of the risk before any test runs.

What a strong answer adds

Positioning automated scanning correctly: it is a regression gate, valuable for preventing new issues, not an assurance instrument. And noting that accessibility is a legal requirement in a growing number of jurisdictions and a contractual one in most public-sector procurement, so the honest answer protects the organisation.

Common weak answers

Confirming compliance based on the scan. Treating accessibility as a pre-launch audit rather than a design property.