# How to Choose a Digital Accessibility Company in India > Updated 2026-08-08 - 10 min read India's accessibility market has grown quickly, and quality varies enormously. Some vendors run an automated scanner, export the PDF and call it an audit. Others do genuine assistive-technology testing and can defend every finding. Both may quote you the same figure. This guide is written to help you tell them apart - including the awkward questions worth asking us. ## Automated scans are roughly a third of the picture Automated tooling is genuinely useful and every serious audit uses it. But industry testing consistently finds automated scanners detect only around a third of WCAG issues - and they systematically miss the ones that matter most to real users. A scanner can tell you an image has no alt text. It cannot tell you the alt text says 'image123.png', that the reading order collapses on mobile, that a custom dropdown is unusable with a keyboard, or that an error message is invisible to a screen reader. Those failures are what actually stop a disabled user completing a transaction. So the first question is simple: what proportion of this audit is manual, and which assistive technologies will you test with? ## Questions worth asking any prospective vendor - Which screen readers will you test with, on which browser and OS combinations? (Expect NVDA and JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS/iOS, TalkBack on Android.) - Will you test keyboard-only navigation, and zoom/reflow at 200% and 400%? - Will findings include a code-level location and reproduction steps, or just a screenshot? - Is a verification re-test after remediation included, and for how long? - Can you produce a VPAT/ACR if we need one for procurement? - Will you test our mobile apps natively, or just the mobile website? - Do people with disabilities participate in your testing process? - Can we see a redacted sample report? ## Indian mandates are not the same as global ones A vendor working only from WCAG may still leave you exposed to an Indian regulator, because several domestic obligations layer additional expectations on top of the technical standard. - IS 17802 - the Bureau of Indian Standards accessibility standard, with statutory weight through the RPwD Act. - RPwD Act 2016 - the underlying legal obligation for accessibility of services. - GIGW 3.0 - guidelines for Indian government websites and apps, going beyond WCAG into content and governance. - RBI expectations - accessibility of banking channels for regulated entities. - SEBI requirements - accessibility for market intermediaries and investor-facing platforms. - Ask specifically whether the report will map findings to the mandate that applies to you, or only to WCAG success criteria. ## Accessibility overlays are not remediation Overlay widgets - the plugin that adds a floating accessibility button - are marketed heavily and bought frequently, usually by organisations under time pressure before a deadline. They do not fix the underlying code. The accessibility community has been consistently critical of them, many screen-reader users actively disable them, and in the United States they have featured in accessibility litigation rather than preventing it. A vendor who proposes an overlay as your compliance strategy is telling you something important about their approach. Assistive technology and remediation tooling can play a legitimate supporting role. The distinction is whether the underlying defects get fixed in your codebase. ## What honest scoping looks like Accessibility audits are priced on the number of unique page templates, user journeys and component patterns - not raw page count. A 10,000-page site built from twelve templates is a smaller job than a 60-page site where every page is bespoke. A vendor who quotes without asking about templates, flows, mobile apps or document volume is guessing, and the number will move later. Expect to be asked what your users actually do on the site, because a representative sample built around real journeys is what makes an audit defensible. ## Be sceptical of conformance guarantees No honest auditor can guarantee you will never face an accessibility complaint, just as no penetration tester can guarantee you will never be breached. What a good auditor provides is defensible evidence: a documented methodology, reproducible findings, a conformance statement tied to a date and scope, and a remediation path. Also be wary of '100% compliant' claims. Conformance is assessed against specific success criteria for a specific scope at a specific time. It is a measured position, not a permanent badge - and any vendor who tells you otherwise is selling certainty they cannot deliver. ## FAQ **How much does a WCAG accessibility audit cost in India?** It depends on scope - the number of unique page templates, user journeys, mobile apps and documents in scope, not raw page count. Any quote given without those details is a guess. We scope precisely and quote a fixed figure before work starts. **How long does an accessibility audit take?** A typical mid-size web application runs two to three weeks from kickoff to report, depending on the number of unique templates and flows. Mobile apps and large document sets add time. **Do we need an accessibility audit if we already use an overlay widget?** Yes. Overlays do not remediate the underlying code, and they are not accepted as conformance by auditors or regulators. If anything, relying on one usually means the real defects are still entirely unaddressed. **Can automated tools alone make us compliant?** No. Automated scanning finds roughly a third of issues and misses most of the barriers that actually block users - keyboard traps, broken reading order, unusable custom components and inaccessible error handling all require manual testing. **Should our audit follow WCAG or Indian standards?** Both. WCAG 2.2 AA is the technical core, but if you are covered by IS 17802/RPwD, GIGW, RBI or SEBI expectations, your report should map findings to that mandate so it is usable as compliance evidence.