What an Accessibility Statement Should Actually Say
An accessibility statement is a written assertion about your own website. That is worth sitting with for a moment, because most of them are written as marketing and read, later, as evidence.
What belongs in it
The standard you aim to meet, and how close you currently are. Three honest positions exist: fully conformant, partially conformant, not yet conformant. Almost nobody is the first one and almost everybody claims it.
How and when you tested, including the method. Automated scan, manual review, testing with actual assistive technology users — these are very different levels of assurance and the reader deserves to know which you did.
What the testing did not cover. This is the part everyone omits and the part that protects you.
A contact route and a response time. In most jurisdictions this matters more than the conformance claim, because it is the bit a regulator or a complainant will actually test. An address nobody monitors is worse than no address.
The date it was prepared. A statement describing a site that no longer exists is worse than none.
Why overstating is the expensive mistake
Automated tools detect roughly a third of WCAG success criteria. They cannot judge whether alt text meaningfully describes an image, whether the reading order of a page makes sense, or whether a custom control can be operated by keyboard.
So a statement that says "this site is WCAG 2.1 AA conformant" on the strength of a green scan result is a claim you have not verified. If somebody hits a barrier and complains, that sentence is now a documented assertion that turned out to be untrue — which is a materially worse position than having said "partially conformant, here is what we know".
Saying less is not weakness. It is the difference between a statement that survives scrutiny and one that invites it.
A generator that does not flatter you
We built one. It asks for four things, produces a statement you can copy or download as a page, and generates entirely in your browser — nothing you type reaches us.
It defaults to partially conformant, states the limits of automated testing in plain words, and includes the feedback route with a response time. If you want a badge that says you passed, it is the wrong tool.
Generate an accessibility statement
Free, and it tells you what it could not check as well as what it could.
Generate an accessibility statement →