As regulatory pressures for accessibility mount around the world, organizations are racing to prepare and digital accessibility platforms (DAPs) are stepping up. This summer and fall, I dove deep into the DAP market, evaluating nine top vendors across 25 criteria for current offering and seven for strategy. As I heard briefings from executive teams and interviewed customers of these vendors, the aphorism “the more things change, the more they stay the same” kept running through my head. While the DAP market is surging around the promise of using AI to boost accessibility, core challenges that prevent organizations from scaling accessibility best practices, including low platform adoption and challenges quantifying the ROI of accessibility investments, persist.
Here are five themes that emerged while I conducted research for The Forrester Wave™: Digital Accessibility Platforms, Q4 2025.
Diverse buyer needs drive highly specialized offerings. While all vendors in our evaluation meet Forrester’s definition of a DAP, some are tailored to specific use cases. For example, one Strong Performer excels at empowering designers and developers to prevent accessibility issues early. Another supports customers with limited development resources by taking on more of the heavy lifting to remediate existing experiences. One Contender centers its platform around delivery of its auditing services. This specialization means many buyers use multiple DAPs — one for embedding accessibility testing into the software development lifecycle and another for monitoring live experiences. Open-source tools also play a role, especially for use cases like detecting and fixing accessibility issues in design workflow tools.
AI is ubiquitous but vendors’ visions and feature depth vary. While adoption of AI features is still early, AI is poised to reshape how organizations achieve accessibility. Leading platforms use AI to accelerate detection, prioritization, remediation, and education. Choosing a vendor with robust, responsibly designed AI capabilities is a must for achieving accessibility at scale. But references we spoke with are also weighing human impacts, ensuring people with disabilities remain central and rethinking the role of accessibility experts as AI agents take on more tasks. DAP vendors vary in the extent to which they’re considering these questions as part of their strategy.
Capability gaps persist in mobile, documents, and ROI. Feature gaps from our 2023 evaluation remain. Only one vendor earned an above par score for mobile testing, and many reference customers said things akin to “I haven’t been impressed by anything I’ve seen for mobile.” Buyers also want better support for PDF testing, noting they need the same level of testing rigor and reporting as for websites. Customers still struggle to tell a clear accessibility ROI story, and most vendors offer little help. The most advanced platforms help teams by linking accessibility data to analytics (e.g., conversion data) or showing the impact of shifting accessibility left into design and development.
UX is a deciding factor in vendor selection. DAPs must serve both technical and non-technical users, but many fall short on the latter. Strong adoption by accessibility teams and engineers doesn’t always translate to business users. To bolster adoption, references cited clear and actionable communication of accessibility issues, leadership-friendly reporting, and low barriers to entry for product teams as key reasons for choosing their vendor.
Geographic expertise is increasingly a big deal for buyers. With the European Accessibility Act and related country laws driving accessibility work, buyers increasingly seek vendors with deep regional knowledge. This includes compliance dashboards tailored to specific regulations and support teams that are fluent in local languages.
What’s Next?
For a deeper view into the market read the full report, The Forrester Wave™: Digital Accessibility Platforms, Q4 2025, available to all Forrester clients now. Use the “Compare vendors” button at the beginning of the report to find the best-fit vendor based on the criteria that matter most for your organization. You can also schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me to ask me questions or discuss how to approach selecting a DAP vendor for your organization.
