10 of the best accessibility audit companies in the USA (2026)

If you need a manual accessibility audit, you want a firm with real assistive technology expertise, not a scanner with a sales team. This list covers ten US companies and nonprofits that do genuine audit work, with verified facts about each and a note on what they're actually known for. I'll also be upfront at the end about where BugPort fits, because we are not one of these firms.

Why does the human part matter so much? Because the problem is bigger than automation can see. WebAIM's annual survey of the top million home pages keeps finding detectable WCAG failures on roughly 95% of them (The WebAIM Million), and automated tools only catch a third to a half of real-world issues in the first place. I pulled more of those numbers together in our accessibility statistics roundup if you want the full picture.

One honest disclaimer before the list: I run a scanning product, so I compete with nobody here on manual audits and, in a sense, with everybody on automation. I've tried to describe each firm the way I'd describe them to a friend. Facts were spot-checked against each company's own site in July 2026, and I've noted where things have changed.

Deque Systems

Founded in 1999 by Preety Kumar and headquartered in Herndon, Virginia (deque.com/company), Deque is probably the most engineering-driven name on this list. They created axe-core, open-sourced it in 2015, and it's now the most widely used accessibility ruleset in the world with billions of downloads (deque.com/axe). If you've used almost any accessibility checker, including ours, you've touched Deque's work.

What they're known for: deep technical audits, developer tooling, and training through Deque University. A natural fit if your engineering team wants to learn, not just receive a PDF of findings.

Level Access

Level Access says it was founded in 1999 by engineers with disabilities, before Section 508 and WCAG even existed (levelaccess.com/company). It's one of the biggest players in the space and has grown partly by combination: it completed a merger with eSSENTIAL Accessibility in August 2022 (announcement) and acquired UserWay, the overlay and automation vendor, in March 2024 (announcement).

What they're known for: enterprise-scale programs. Audits, monitoring, training, and legal support under one roof, aimed at large organizations that want a single vendor for the whole accessibility function.

TPGi

TPGi began life as The Paciello Group, one of the most respected consultancies in the field, and rebranded to TPGi in 2021. It's part of Vispero, the company behind the JAWS screen reader. One change worth noting: as of mid-2026, tpgi.com lands on Vispero's unified site, where the audit, VPAT, and ARC Toolkit services now live under the Vispero brand (tpgi.com).

What they're known for: pedigree. Being under the same roof as JAWS means their consultants sit unusually close to how screen reader users actually experience the web. Their free ARC Toolkit and Colour Contrast Analyser are staples.

WebAIM

WebAIM is a nonprofit service center at Utah State University, operating since 1999 (webaim.org/about). They run WAVE, the free evaluation tool half the industry started with, and publish the WebAIM Million, the annual study I cited above. Their articles on screen reader behavior and form labeling are the ones practitioners actually link each other.

What they're known for: education and evaluation with zero sales pressure. As a university-affiliated nonprofit, they're a strong choice if you want an audit from an organization with no product to upsell.

UsableNet

UsableNet has been doing digital accessibility since 2000 (their own 25-year retrospective). Outside of client work, they're best known for publishing the ADA digital lawsuit tracker, the industry's standard source for litigation trends, cited by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. If you've read a statistic about web accessibility lawsuits, including in our own lawsuit statistics post, it probably traces back to their data.

What they're known for: litigation awareness. Their audits and managed services are shaped by two decades of watching exactly what plaintiffs' firms file about.

AudioEye

AudioEye is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona and is one of the few public companies in this space, trading on NASDAQ as AEYE (investors.audioeye.com). Their model combines automated fixes with expert audits and claims over 127,000 customers (audioeye.com).

What they're known for: automation-first accessibility at volume. Fair warning for this list's purpose: they're a platform company that also sells expert audits, not a boutique audit firm. If you specifically want a deep manual assessment as the product, ask pointed questions about scope. If you want automation with humans behind it, they're a serious option.

Allyant

Allyant brought three specialist firms under one brand: T-Base Communications (over 25 years in accessible documents like braille and large print), CommonLook (PDF accessibility software and services), and Accessible360 (a live-user web auditing firm) (their announcement).

What they're known for: being the strongest answer when your problem includes documents. If your compliance surface is PDFs, statements, and print alternatives as much as web pages, that combination is hard to match. The Accessible360 side brings audits performed by assistive technology users.

Knowbility

Knowbility is a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas, founded in 1999 out of a community effort to raise digital accessibility awareness (knowbility.org/about). They run the Accessibility Internet Rally (a hackathon before the word existed, in their words) and the annual AccessU training conference, which started in 2006. They also sell audits, usability testing, and training, and the revenue supports the mission.

What they're known for: community. Hiring them funds accessibility education, and their auditors are drawn from a community that includes people with disabilities. A good cultural fit for mission-driven organizations.

Equal Entry

Equal Entry was founded in 2012 by Thomas Logan, who spent the prior decade doing accessibility work at large organizations (equalentry.com/about). It's a smaller, globally distributed consultancy doing audits, training, and some genuinely early work on XR and virtual reality accessibility.

What they're known for: depth over scale. If you're building something unusual (VR, real-time media, novel interfaces) where checklist audits fall short, a smaller firm led by a hands-on expert can beat a big one.

Perkins Access

Perkins Access is the digital accessibility consulting arm of Perkins School for the Blind. Their approach pairs accessibility experts with a network of users with disabilities for usability testing, alongside WCAG audits, design reviews, and strategic consulting (perkinsaccess.org/our-approach; note the site now lives at perkins.org/digital-accessibility).

What they're known for: the school. Perkins has served blind and low-vision people for generations, and that lived expertise gives their user testing a credibility most firms can't buy. Nonprofit-affiliated, like WebAIM and Knowbility.

Where BugPort fits (and where it doesn't)

Let me be plain: BugPort is not an audit company, and I won't pretend a scanner replaces the firms above. Nothing automated can.

Here's what we actually do. A manual audit is a snapshot; your site changes every week after it. BugPort runs continuous automated WCAG scans (the same axe-core engine Deque open-sourced) and turns each finding into a ticket with element-level evidence, so regressions get caught and assigned between audits instead of piling up for the next one. Teams also run us before commissioning an audit, because paying a senior consultant day rates to write up missing alt text is a waste of their expertise and your budget.

A good audit firm plus continuous scanning beats either one alone. The firm finds what machines can't; the scanning keeps their findings from silently coming back. Neither one makes you compliant by itself, and you should walk away from anyone who claims otherwise (that instinct is half the argument in our accessibility approach).

FAQ

Which of these companies are nonprofits?

WebAIM (a service center at Utah State University) and Knowbility (Austin, Texas) are nonprofits. Perkins Access is the consulting arm of Perkins School for the Blind, itself a nonprofit. The other seven are commercial firms.

Do I still need a manual audit if I run automated scans?

For anything with legal exposure or a serious user base, yes. Automated tools catch roughly a third to a half of real issues; keyboard traps, focus order, and screen reader usability need humans. The scan's job is to keep the machine-detectable layer clean so the audit budget goes to problems that actually need expertise.

How do I choose between them?

Match the firm to your actual problem. Engineering-heavy team that wants to learn: Deque or TPGi. Enterprise program with one vendor: Level Access. Documents and PDFs: Allyant. Litigation-driven urgency: UsableNet. Mission alignment or user testing by people with disabilities: WebAIM, Knowbility, or Perkins Access. Novel interfaces: Equal Entry. Ask any of them for a sample report before signing; the good ones hand it over without hesitation.

What should I do before the audit starts?

Fix the cheap stuff. Run automated scans, clear the criticals (missing alt text, unlabeled fields, contrast), and hand the auditors a site where their time goes to expert-level findings. You'll get a shorter report and more value per dollar.

If you want that pre-audit baseline today, our free WCAG scan will check any URL against WCAG 2.1 criteria and show you exactly what the automated layer can find, element by element, before you spend a dollar on consultants.