15 accessibility questions to ask your digital agency

A few months ago, I wrote about design questions to ask during the design phase to foster collaboration between design and development teams within an agency. But what if you’re hiring a digital agency for an upcoming project? How do you assess their accessibility capabilities?

Here are 15 accessibility questions you can ask when interviewing digital agencies:

1. What accessibility standards do you use to guide your development process?
2. At which phases of the project lifecycle is accessibility considered?
3. What’s your approach to prioritizing and fixing accessibility issues?
4. What are the roles and responsibilities in your organization for ensuring you are building accessible products?
5. What accessibility training does your team receive, and how often?
6. Do you include users with disabilities in your user testing?
7. Can you show me a website you’ve built that is accessible and walk me through specific accessibility features you implemented?
8. What assistive technologies do you test with (screen readers, voice control, keyboard navigation, magnification software)?
9. What automated testing tools do you use, and what percentage of issues do you catch through manual testing?
10. How do you ensure third-party integrations (maps, videos, forms, chatbots) remain accessible?
11. How do you handle accessibility for dynamic content and single-page applications?
12. What’s your process for fixing accessibility issues discovered post-launch?
13. Do you provide documentation for content editors on maintaining accessibility?
14. How does accessibility impact project timelines and budgets?
15. Is accessibility testing included in the base price or treated as an add-on?

Keep in mind, some agencies will tell you their accessibility compliance is handled by a separate vendor. This isn’t necessarily a red flag – specialized expertise can be valuable. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the agency representative to either have these answers or schedule a call where their accessibility partner can address them directly. The key is that someone owns this responsibility and can speak to it confidently.