So you’re looking to hire a WCAG or accessibility specialist. Something probably prompted it - a legal letter, a client asking for a VPAT, someone in your organisation finally reading about the European Accessibility Act.

Whatever it was, you’re now trying to figure out who’s actually good at this versus who’s just good at sounding like they are. That distinction matters more in accessibility than almost anywhere else.

I do this work, so I’m obviously not a neutral party here. However I’ve also been on the other side — I’ve seen the kind of audits that get produced when someone with minimal experience wins a contract on price. So let me tell you what I’d look for if I were hiring someone other than myself.

What a WCAG specialist actually does

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It’s the international standard for making websites and apps accessible to disabled people. A real specialist knows it well enough to audit against it, translate findings into things developers can fix, and ideally help teams not make the same mistakes next time round.

In practice the work splits into a few things:

  • Auditing testing a website, app or document against WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 criteria (AA is the standard benchmark in most legal contexts)
  • Remediation guidance not just saying what’s wrong, but explaining how to fix it in terms a developer can actually use
  • Design review catching problems before they get built, which is cheaper for everyone
  • Training helping your product, design or engineering team understand this stuff themselves
  • Conformance reporting writing VPATs, accessibility statements, ACRs

What to look for when screening

The biggest tell is their testing methodology. Automated tools like axe, Wave, or Lighthouse are useful (I use them myself) but they catch somewhere around 30–40% of real WCAG failures. If someone’s audit process starts and ends with a scan, you’re not getting a real audit. You’re getting a report that misses most of the problems. Ask them directly: do they test with a keyboard? Do they test with a screen reader? What assistive technologies do they use?

Ask them which WCAG criteria they find most commonly misunderstood.

A vague answer like “colour contrast comes up a lot” is a surface-level answer. Someone with real experience will give you something specific — things like focus order, name/role/value, reflow at 400% zoom, non-text contrast for UI components. Those are the areas where understanding the spec actually matters.

Ask to see a sample audit report. I’ve seen reports that are basically axe output pasted into a document with no explanation. I’ve seen others where every finding is mapped to a specific success criterion, explains the real user impact, and gives the developer enough to act on without a follow-up call. Those are very different products.

What to avoid

Anyone who guarantees “full WCAG compliance” from a single engagement isn’t being straight with you. Accessibility isn’t a box you tick once. It’s a quality that needs to be maintained as a product changes. I’d be cautious of that framing.

If someone recommends an overlay as a primary solution, that’s a red flag. Overlay are third-party widgets that claim to fix accessibility automatically. They don’t. Over 800 accessibility professionals have signed an open letter saying as much. No specialist who knows their stuff would lead with that recommendation.

Also watch out for inflated timelines. A WCAG audit of a modest ten-page marketing site doesn’t take months. But equally, someone claiming they can thoroughly audit a complex web application in a day is underselling what the work actually involves. Scope should roughly match complexity.

On rates

Honestly, this is hard to generalise. Rates vary a lot depending on location, experience, and what kind of work it is. Audit work tends to be scoped and fixed. Ongoing advisory or embedded work is different.

What I’d say is - a cheap audit that misses the things that matter will cost you more later, either in a complaint, a legal challenge, or an expensive remediation project under pressure. The right question isn’t the lowest rate. It’s whether you have evidence they find real problems.

If you’re looking for someone with this background, my work page has more on how I approach accessibility consultancy and what I typically work on.