A professional ADA website audit takes five weeks from kickoff call to final delivery of your complete evidence package and attorney opinion letter. If you have urgent circumstances — an active demand letter, a due diligence process closing in three weeks, or an enterprise contract pending accessibility documentation — we can discuss expedited timelines. But the standard process is five weeks, and here's exactly what happens during each of those weeks.

Week One: Kickoff and Access Setup

We start with a 30–45 minute kickoff call where we walk through the scope of testing, confirm which pages and user flows are most critical to your business, identify any known accessibility issues or concerns you're already aware of, and establish access to your site.

You tell us what matters most to you. If you have a booking system that generates 60% of your revenue, we prioritize that. If you have a client portal where customers access sensitive documents, we make sure that's tested thoroughly. If you have specific pages that enterprise clients are asking about, we focus there.

By the end of week one, we have a confirmed project plan, testing access established, and a shared understanding of priorities. This week is about alignment — making sure we're testing what matters to your business, not just running through a generic checklist.

Weeks Two and Three: Comprehensive Testing Across All Eight Modules

This is where the bulk of the work happens. We're running site crawls and building your page inventory. We're running WAVE, axe, Lighthouse, and color contrast tools on every page. We're manually testing keyboard navigation on every form, every interactive element, every dropdown menu, every modal, every booking flow.

We're loading your site in screen readers — NVDA with Chrome and VoiceOver with Safari — and recording those sessions. We're listening to how your site sounds when read aloud, evaluating whether the content makes sense, identifying where alt text is missing or unhelpful, noting where form error messages are confusing when heard rather than seen.

We're opening every downloadable PDF in accessibility checkers and verifying tag structures and reading orders. We're organizing screenshots, scan results, and video recordings into timestamped evidence folders.

This is methodical, detailed work. A human tester is navigating your site with a keyboard, attempting to complete tasks, documenting where things work and where they break. That takes time — and it cannot be rushed without compromising the quality and defensibility of the findings.

By the end of week three, all raw testing data has been collected and all evidence folders have been populated. We know what issues exist. Now we need to document them in a way that's actionable and legally defensible.

Weeks Three and Four: Findings Compilation, Analysis, and Remediation Planning

Now we take all the raw data from testing and turn it into organized, prioritized guidance. We're building the centralized issues log in Google Sheets — every finding gets a row with severity rating, WCAG criterion reference, screenshot link, screen recording clip link, written fix recommendation, suggested team assignment, and effort estimate.

We're analyzing patterns across the findings to understand root causes. Is this a template issue affecting 20 pages? Or isolated problems on individual pages? Root cause analysis shapes the remediation roadmap significantly — fixing a template problem once is far more efficient than fixing the same issue on 20 separate pages.

We're writing fix recommendations in clear language that your developer, designer, or content team can actually understand and implement. Not WCAG criterion numbers in isolation — actual guidance on what needs to change and how to change it.

We're creating the three-tier remediation roadmap that separates must-fix items (immediate legal exposure) from should-fix items (significant user barriers) from nice-to-fix improvements (best practice enhancements). This prioritization tells your team what to tackle first and what can be addressed in later sprints.

By the end of week four, you have a complete findings log, organized evidence folders in Google Drive, and a prioritized remediation roadmap that tells your development team exactly what to do.

Weeks Four and Five: Attorney Review and Legal Documentation

The complete audit package — evidence folders, issues log, remediation roadmap — goes to a licensed attorney for review and certification. The attorney evaluates the testing methodology, reviews a sample of findings and their documentation, and confirms that the process represents a thorough, professional assessment of your website's accessibility status.

The attorney then issues a formal opinion letter. This letter is the document that matters most in a legal context — it certifies your compliance process, provides an attorney's professional judgment about your accessibility posture, and may create attorney-client privilege for sensitive findings.

Your complete defense file is then delivered: the evidence package in Google Drive, the centralized issues log in Google Sheets, the prioritized remediation roadmap, and the attorney opinion letter. Everything is organized and ready to hand to legal counsel the moment a demand letter arrives — or to share with an enterprise client conducting due diligence.

Why Five Weeks and Not Two?

Because this work cannot be done responsibly in less time. Manual keyboard testing of a 30-page website with multiple forms, booking flows, and interactive elements takes hours — not minutes. Screen reader testing sessions need to be thorough enough to evaluate actual usability, not just structural compliance. Evidence organization needs to be detailed enough to be useful in a legal proceeding.

Companies that promise ADA audits in 48 hours are running automated scans and calling it an audit. The output looks like an audit report. The legal value is approximately zero.

Five weeks is the minimum timeline for work that holds up when it matters. It's also why we're able to include attorney review — the attorney needs time to actually review the package, not just rubber-stamp a report that was generated by a script.

What If You Have an Active Demand Letter?

If you've already received a demand letter, your first call should be to an attorney — not an audit firm. An attorney needs to advise you on your response timeline and legal strategy. An audit conducted under attorney direction after a demand letter may also qualify for additional privilege protections.

Once your attorney has assessed the situation, if they determine that a professional accessibility audit would strengthen your defense or support a remediation agreement, we can discuss expedited timelines. We can typically compress the testing and documentation phases significantly when circumstances require it.

Contact us directly to discuss your situation. We'll give you an honest assessment of what's realistic and what we can deliver in your timeframe.