Six weeks before launch, an accessibility audit returns 200 issues. The team's automated checks were green. Why, and what do you do?

Why the checks were green

Automated tooling reliably decides roughly a third of the criteria: missing alternative text, insufficient contrast, absent form labels, invalid ARIA, unlabelled controls. Those are worth catching on every build and they are the minority.

The rest are judgements a machine cannot make — whether alternative text is meaningful, whether focus order matches logical order, whether an error message explains how to fix the problem, whether a custom component is keyboard-operable, whether a screen reader announces a dynamic update at a useful moment.

A green build reported as "accessible" is the false assurance this arrangement produces.

Triage the 200 by user impact, not by count

Blockers — a user cannot complete a task at all. A keyboard trap, an unlabelled submit control, a custom component with no keyboard operation. These are the launch gate.

Serious — the task is completable with significant difficulty. Poor focus management, unannounced updates, unclear errors.

Minor — inconvenience.

Two hundred issues frequently reduce to a small number of root causes: one component used on forty screens produces forty findings.

Fix by cause

Fixing the component fixes the forty. Sort the findings by component and by pattern before estimating, because the estimate based on issue count will be several times too high and will drive the wrong decision about the launch date.

Then change how this is caught

Automated checks in CI on every component and page — necessary, insufficient, and their coverage stated honestly rather than implied.

Keyboard-only testing as a routine practice, not an audit. It is free and it catches the focus management issues that dominate the serious category.

Screen reader testing on the critical journeys each release.

Accessibility in the definition of done for new components, so the design system carries it and the forty screens inherit it.

What to tell the sponsor

The blockers are a launch gate; the rest can be scheduled. And there is a legal dimension in most jurisdictions for public-facing services, which makes this a risk decision rather than a quality preference — worth stating explicitly so the decision is taken at the right level.