Closing the Accessibility Risk Gap: How to Surface the Risks That Matter and Reduce Exposure

According to our Seventh Annual State of Digital Accessibility Report, 92% of professionals say they’re at least “somewhat confident” in the accessibility of their digital experiences. Yet nearly six in ten still feel exposed to legal or regulatory action.

That disconnect reveals a common problem for accessibility programs: organizations don’t have a reliable insight on their true risk status. What’s more, when it comes to reducing exposure, many teams are unsure what to prioritize to make a real impact. We call this lack of clarity, and lack of focus, the “risk gap.”

So why does this gap occur—and how can you close it to protect your organization from lawsuits, regulatory enforcement, and lost business? In this post, we’ll explore why so many teams struggle to identify and prioritize accessibility risk. We’ll also share practical steps you can take to start understanding, and minimizing, your exposure.

Why is it so hard to understand and prioritize accessibility risk?

To understand their risk status, many teams start by running free automated scans or requesting a one-time manual audit—only to be met with a long list of issues, wondering where to even start. Without a way to interpret and prioritize these findings, progress stalls, leaving organizations exposed to legal action—and users with disabilities navigating barrier-riddled experiences. So, what’s going wrong?

• Automation delivers an incomplete picture: Automated scans surface some issues but rarely reveal root causes—allowing the same problems to reappear in new content and features, proliferating risks as digital portfolios grow.
• Audits alone don’t scale: Manual audits provide critical context on the root causes of issues, but they take time and are resource-intensive. As a result, they can be difficult to scale across teams and assets, or to obtain frequently enough to get up-to-date insight in fast-paced environments.
• Teams get stuck fixing symptoms, not systems: Developers spend valuable time chasing one-off issues, instead of addressing problems at the source. Teams get overwhelmed, costs pile up, and programs fail to make lasting progress.

Compounding these challenges, many organizations lack insight on where exactly issues are occurring, and how different findings relate to each other—including which issues are replicated across pages and digital assets. This makes it difficult to prioritize the fixes that will have the greatest impact and ensure they’re assigned to the right team.

How to close the risk gap

The most effective way to understand and reduce accessibility risk is through a hybrid intelligence approach—combining automated testing, AI-driven prioritization, and human judgment. Together, these capabilities give teams a complete, contextual understanding of risk and the clarity they need to fix high-impact issues early and prevent them from recurring.

So, how can you put this approach into action? The following best practices can help you start closing the risk gap in your organization.

1. Combine automated monitoring with regular manual audits from human experts.

Automated scans provide efficiency and portfolio-wide coverage, but they don’t tell a complete story. Human judgement is essential to validate findings and surface issues that automation alone can’t detect. Effective accessibility programs use both approaches for comprehensive, scalable insight.

2. Unify testing data with an accessibility platform.

Interpreting data from different sources can be tricky. We recommend using a platform-based solution that consolidates findings from audits and scans across your assets. This makes it easy to get a complete picture of organization-wide risk, without spending hours stitching together spreadsheets or trying to get to the bottom of data discrepancies.

3. Harness AI to efficiently prioritize issues based on impact.

Often, similar (or even identical) issues are repeated across pages, components, and templates. It’s typically faster, and easier, for developers to fix these issues at the same time—and addressing a repeated issue tends to have a much bigger impact on your overall exposure than resolving an error on a single page.

AI capabilities, like those in the Level Access Platform, automatically group recurring and related findings so your teams can tackle these high-priority fixes first. Teams can also use AI tools to prioritize groups of findings based on their unique goals, or surface issues relevant to their specific role.

4. Integrate accessibility testing into your CI/CD pipeline.

It’s much faster, and more cost-effective, to fix issues during the build process than in live experiences. Use accessibility-specific CI/CD integrations to incorporate automated testing into your CI pipeline, allowing developers to identify and address issues before they reach production. By embedding accessibility checks into your build processes, you reduce the likelihood that risks resurface when new products and content are released.

Proactive accessibility is the most effective risk reduction strategy.

When they first commit to accessibility, most teams are focused on minimizing their current risk exposure by removing barriers from live digital experiences. But the most efficient, long-term strategy for risk reduction is to prevent issues from emerging in the first place.

Incorporating accessibility checkpoints in development with tools like CI/CD integrations is a meaningful step in this direction. However, proactive, sustainable accessibility goes beyond development. It involves teams across an organization—including designers, product managers, and content authors—working together to ensure accessibility is considered at every stage of digital experience creation, from ideation to release.

When accessibility becomes a shared priority, embedded into teams’ everyday workflows, organizations move from reactive fixes to sustainable, predictable control.

Start moving from risk to resolution.

Improving accessibility outcomes starts with clarity on which issues truly matter—and addressing them early to prevent downstream legal or business impact. The right partner can help you confidently understand your current risk status, prioritize high-impact fixes, and shift from reactive remediation to proactive prevention.

Level Access has helped organizations of all sizes, across industries, move from late-stage discovery to early, continuous risk identification. We combine automation, AI, and human expertise to surface issues in context, helping teams focus on what matters most and solve problems before they impact users or compliance.

Ready to gain clarity on your true risk status and reduce exposure?

Schedule a demo today.