Best Accessibility Platforms for SaaS Companies

For a SaaS company, accessibility isn’t one project. It’s two. 

There’s your marketing site, the pages potential customers read before they ever log in. And there’s your application, the product itself, sitting behind authentication and changing state with every click. Both have to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(opens in a new tab) (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, and the application is the harder of the two to get right.

That’s the reason to look for a platform built for the full picture, one that covers both surfaces instead of just the “easy” one. The dual scope is the whole point, and it’s the part buyers most often miss when they start evaluating accessibility solutions. 

The rest of this page works through the questions that follow: what makes SaaS accessibility different, what to require from a platform, why a VPAT becomes a deal gate in procurement, and how conformance affects selling into regulated industries.

Why SaaS Accessibility is Different

SaaS accessibility differs from standard website accessibility because the application is dynamic and authenticated, requiring developer-level fixes in the codebase rather than surface-level fixes. 

Start with the marketing site. It matters just as much as any other surface and must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. However, it’s more predictable to work with: mostly static content pages, a pricing table, a few forms — a structure that’s ideal for automated tools. 

Then there’s the application. It sits behind a login, so a tool scanning your public URLs never sees it. It’s a single-page application in most cases, which means the page never fully reloads and the content shifts constantly as users interact with it. State changes. Modals open. Routes update without a page refresh. A keyboard user tabbing through a dynamic component, a screen reader trying to announce a live region that just updated. These are where accessibility breaks, and they live inside code that a page-level scanner can’t reach.

That’s why the application is the harder surface to make accessible. It’s where users spend their time, it’s the most complex part of the product, and it needs fixes written into the code itself. You can’t audit your way to an accessible application from the outside. The work has to happen where the components are built. Both surfaces matter equally, but the application is the one that demands more from your tooling and your team. 

Stylized web browser with a pop-up of a checklist with a magnifying glass over the accessibility icon.

What Developers Should Require: SDK and Integration

Developers should require an accessibility platform with an SDK, API access, CI/CD integration, and component-level testing that works inside single-page applications, not just page-level scans. 

If the application is where the risk lives, then the platform has to meet developers in their actual workflow. At a minimum, that means:

• An SDK and API access for testing from inside the codebase

• CI/CD integration that runs accessibility checks in the pipeline

• Component-level and design-system testing

• Single-page application and route-change handling

• Automated monitoring built into the development workflow

Here’s what each of those looks like in practice.

An SDK and API Access

An accessibility developer SDK lets your team call accessibility testing directly from code, the same way they’d use any other library, instead of logging into a separate dashboard and pasting in URLs. This matters because the application’s accessibility state lives in the code, not in a rendered page that an external tool can crawl. 

With API access, you can pull accessibility results into your own systems, trigger scans programmatically, and treat accessibility data as your product's responsibility rather than a vendor's. The test for any platform here is simple: can a developer integrate it without leaving their editor?

CI/CD Integration

Accessibility tests should run in the pipeline alongside everything else. When a pull request introduces a contrast failure or a missing form label, the developer who wrote it should hear about it before it ships, not three sprints later in an audit. 

This is the difference between accessibility as a continuous practice and accessibility as a one-off task. A bug caught at the point of commit costs a few minutes to fix. The same bug, caught after release, means reopening old code, retesting, and shipping a patch, which is why retrofitting a released product is so much more expensive than building accessibility in from the start. A platform built for SaaS WCAG conformance should fail a build the same way a broken unit test does.

Component-Level and Design-System Testing

SaaS products are built from reusable components: a button, a date picker, a data table, used across hundreds of screens. Test the component once, fix it once, and every screen that uses it inherits the fix. This is the highest-leverage move in SaaS accessibility, and a platform that only evaluates finished pages misses it entirely. It would flag the same broken date picker on forty separate screens as forty separate issues, instead of applying one fix at the source, for example. 

Testing at the component and design-system level turns accessibility from an endless list of page defects into a manageable set of source-level fixes.

SPA and Route-Change Handling

Most SaaS applications are single-page applications, meaning the browser never fully reloads as users navigate the product. The view changes, content updates, and modals open and close, all without a traditional page load. A platform built for web application ADA compliance has to re-evaluate every time the view changes, track content that loads dynamically, and catch the issues that only surface after a user interacts: focus that gets lost when a modal closes, a live region that never announces an update, a route change a screen reader user is never told about. This is exactly the gap general accessibility tools leave open, and it’s a significant reason SaaS companies need a platform built to handle applications. 

Monitoring Inside the Development Flow

Accessibility is not a one-time project. Every release can inadvertently introduce new issues, so the platform should integrate automated monitoring into development workflows and surface new issues continuously, in the tools developers already use, rather than waiting for the next scheduled audit. 

When monitoring lives in a workflow, new issues are flagged in the pipeline or dashboard that your team already checks, rather than as a surprise in a quarterly report. That keeps the application compliant as it evolves, rather than letting it lapse between audits.

If a platform can’t do these things, it’s not the right tool for SaaS companies. 

A text document with the words Voluntary Product Accessibility Template

VPAT and the Procurement Cycle

SaaS companies need a VPAT as enterprise and government buyers require it in RFPs as evidence of WCAG 2.1 Level AA and Section 508 conformance before a deal can close.

A VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, is the document that records how your product measures up against accessibility standards. It’s a procurement artifact, and it shows up in RFPs as a requirement you either met or didn’t.

Here’s how it typically works: a large enterprise or a government agency runs a buying process. Their procurement team includes accessibility conformance in their requirements, typically referencing WCAG 2.1 Level AA and Section 508. They ask every vendor for a VPAT. If you don’t have one, or yours shows gaps you can’t explain, you’re at a disadvantage. SaaS WCAG conformance stops being an abstract goal at the moment and becomes a line item between you and securing the contract. 

This is why VPAT for SaaS has moved from nice-to-have to a gate. The buyers with the biggest budgets are frequently the ones with the strictest requirements. 

Selling Into Regulated Industries

For regulated buyers in healthcare, finance, and government, documented accessibility conformance removes a procurement deal-blocker, so a strong VPAT and WCAG 2.1 Level AA evidence can directly unblock revenue.

It’s easy to frame accessibility as risk avoidance, something you do to minimize your legal risk. For B2B SaaS accessibility, however, that framing undersells it. In regulated industries, accessibility is a requirement of doing business, and the buyer is the one enforcing it.

The mechanism is the same across these industries. The buyer operates under its own accessibility obligations and passes those obligations down to every vendor it engages. A piece of software that isn’t conformant becomes the buyer’s liability the moment it goes into production, so procurement screens it out before it ever reaches a contract. That’s why documented conformance, a VPAT plus evidence of WCAG conformance, functions as a key that either opens the deal or doesn’t. 

Healthcare

A platform selling to hospital systems and health networks runs into buyers who treat accessibility as part of patient access and their own compliance posture. Software that staff or patients can’t access is a risk the buyer can’t take, so a clear VPAT and WCAG 2.1 Level AA evidence is often required before the evaluation goes further.

Financial Services

Banks, insurers, and fintech buyers operate in one of the most scrutinized environments for accessibility, with a long history of enforcement attention on digital services. A SaaS vendor selling into this space should expect accessibility status to be examined closely, and being able to produce documented evidence early removes a question that would otherwise stall the deal.

Government

Selling to federal, state, or local government means Section 508 conformance is typically mandatory, and the VPAT is the standard way agencies confirm it. Here, accessibility isn’t a preference the buyer might weigh. It’s frequently a hard requirement, and a missing or weak VPAT can disqualify a vendor outright.

In each case, the move is the same: documented accessibility conformance removes a procurement deal-blocker. So when your product has evidence ready, you’re not just lowering your own legal exposure. You’re removing a blocker that could stall or even kill the deal. 

That reframes the spend. While accessibility can lower your risk of a lawsuit, it’s also a way to unblock revenue that's sitting on the other side of a procurement requirement, often revenue from the largest, most demanding buyers you have.

Mouse cursor on the bottom panel of three and an accessibility symbol

AudioEye: The Platform SaaS Teams Actually Need. 

SaaS accessibility comes down to three requirements: cover both the marketing site and the authenticated application, integrate into the development workflow so issues get caught early, and produce the VPAT documentation that opens deals with enterprise and government buyers. A platform that only handles one surface, forces developers to leave their workflow, or can't meet procurement requirements, isn't built for this problem.

AudioEye handles all three. Our Developer Tools run in your CI/CD pipeline, so accessibility checks happen alongside every other test. Active Monitoring tracks your application as it changes, catching regressions in real time instead of waiting for the next audit. And when regulated buyers ask for a VPAT, we deliver documentation backed by ~97% issue coverage and the industry's only proven legal guarantee.

Ready to see how AudioEye fits into your stack? Schedule a demo to see how AudioEye works with your dev workflows. Or scan your site now to see exactly where your accessibility gaps are.