Stop remediating. Start building it right the first time.
The standard accessibility workflow — design, export, discover it's broken, remediate — is expensive and never produces results as good as designing correctly from the start. Here's what building it in looks like instead.
If you're responsible for digital accessibility at your organisation, you'll recognise this cycle: a form or document gets designed, it gets exported or published, someone runs a checker over it, and a list of problems comes back. Heading hierarchy broken. Images missing alt text. Reading order scrambled. Now it's a remediation project, with its own timeline and its own budget line, for a document that already existed.
That cycle repeats every time a new form gets built, because the tool that built it was never designed to produce accessible output in the first place. It's not that anyone did anything wrong. It's that accessibility was treated as a check to pass at the end, rather than a property of the tool doing the building.
Why remediation keeps coming back
Remediation feels like a one-off project, but it never actually is. Every new form built in the same tool, by the same process, comes out with the same gaps, because nothing about the underlying process changed. The organisation ends up paying for the same fixes, on a rolling basis, indefinitely.
Remediation caps out below what building it right achieves
Retrofitting accessibility onto an existing document is inherently more limited than designing it in from the start. Reading order, heading structure, and semantic relationships are easier to get right when the tool understands them from the first click, not when they're being reverse-engineered afterwards.
What "built in, not bolted on" actually means
Semantic structure from the first field
Every field gets a real, associated label. Every heading is a genuine heading, not a bold paragraph. Reading and tab order follow the visual layout, because the canvas is built around that constraint rather than checked against it afterwards.
The Accessibility Wizard, before you publish
A 6-tab check covering heading hierarchy, image alt text, tab order, colour contrast (WCAG 1.4.3), field label associations, and an overall compliance report, in plain language rather than a raw list of success criteria.
Two accessible outputs, one design
Publish as a WCAG 2.2 AA compliant web form, or export as a PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) tagged PDF. Same source design, both outputs meet their respective standard without a separate remediation pass for either.
The remediation cycle
Design the form, export it, run an accessibility checker, get a list of failures back, fix them by hand, re-check, and hope nothing regresses the next time someone edits it.
Compliant by default
Design the form. It's already structured correctly. The Wizard confirms it before publishing, and it stays correct because the underlying structure doesn't degrade when the content changes.
A migration path, not a rebuild-everything mandate
Nobody remediates their entire form estate at once, and nobody needs to. A sensible starting point is auditing existing forms with a tool like WAVE or Axe to get a baseline, then prioritising by how many people actually use each one. High-traffic forms move first. Most forms take a few hours to rebuild in FormGenius, considerably less than a specialist remediation pass on an existing inaccessible PDF, and everything built from that point on is accessible by default rather than needing its own remediation project later.
Auditing more than just your forms?
The same remediation problem applies to the rest of your site, not only your forms. Our partner WebYes runs the same kind of scan — against WCAG 2.0–2.2, ADA and Section 508 — across every page, with AI-suggested fixes rather than just a list of errors to work through by hand. FormGenius users get 20% off the WebYes Pro Monthly Plan (and it runs both ways for WebYes customers). Read more about the partnership.
See how WebYes can keep the rest of your site accessible, with 20% off for FormGenius users.
Explore WebYes (opens in new tab)Keep the records anyway
Even with a tool that produces accessible output by default, it's worth keeping a record of what's been migrated and what's been checked. It's good practice, and it's useful evidence of a genuine, ongoing process if your organisation's approach is ever questioned.
Every form is WCAG 2.2 AA and PDF/UA compliant from the moment you create it, no remediation step required.
See how compliance works in FormGenius
