Catching Accessibility Regressions Before Your Auditors Do

You audited the site, fixed the issues, published the statement. Three weeks later a marketing team swaps the hero image, a new component lands without a label, and a colour tweak drops your contrast below the line. Nobody noticed — because accessibility, unlike a signed contract, drifts. Every deploy is a chance to reintroduce a barrier.

Why a point-in-time audit is not enough

An accessibility statement makes a claim about a moving target. The day you publish it, it is accurate. The question regulators, customers and courts really care about is whether it is still accurate. A stale statement can be worse than none — it documents a promise you are no longer keeping.

What continuous monitoring does

A11yProof can re-scan your saved sites on a schedule and compare each result against the previous one. Instead of a fresh wall of warnings, you get a diff:

• New issues — barriers a change just introduced, so you can fix them while the change is fresh in someone's mind.
• Resolved issues — confirmation that a fix actually landed and stuck.

When a regression appears, the site owner gets an email — not a dashboard they have to remember to check. The signal reaches you when it matters, on the address that verified it.

A live evidence trail

Every monitored scan is timestamped and kept, so your history is not a single dated PDF but a continuous record: here is the site in June, in July, in August. That trend line is exactly the "assessment over time" that accessibility regimes increasingly expect — and it is the difference between saying "we care about accessibility" and being able to prove it.

Set the floor, then hold it

Automated monitoring will not catch everything — it reliably covers the roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues that are machine-detectable. But that 30–40% is precisely the part that regresses silently between manual audits. Let automation hold the floor continuously, and reserve expert manual review for the depth. Together they keep your accessibility statement true on the day someone actually reads it.

General information, not legal advice.