Program Standards & Methodology

Uplift Accredited is an independent digital accessibility recognition program, launching soon. Today it offers website accessibility assessments and evidence-backed findings reports; when the program launches, organizations will be able to earn the Uplift Accredited standing by having their website assessed against this published methodology, resolving the issues identified, and passing a verification review.

• This is a private program. It is not a government agency, and Uplift Accredited is not a government certification. No U.S. government body certifies websites as accessible.
• Uplift Accredited recognizes demonstrated work against this published methodology. It is not a guarantee that a website is fully accessible to every person, and it is not a determination of legal compliance with the ADA, Section 504, or any other law. Only a court can determine legal compliance.
• For healthcare organizations: Uplift Accredited is a digital accessibility recognition program. It is not affiliated with CMS, ACHC, CHAP, or The Joint Commission and does not affect Medicare certification or clinical accreditation status.

We publish this page — the full methodology, its limits, and the ways the standing can be lost — before issuing anything, because a recognition program is only as meaningful as what it's willing to say out loud.

We assess websites against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA — the standard referenced by the U.S. Department of Justice's ADA Title II web rule and the Department of Health and Human Services' Section 504 web rule. WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA together comprise 50 success criteria organized under four principles: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

For document accessibility, we assess PDFs against PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1), the international standard for accessible PDF documents.

The specific success criteria covered by each assessment method, and the method used for each, are published in the methodology coverage table. That table is generated directly from our running assessment configuration — never hand-authored — so the published standard and the tools that enforce it cannot drift apart.

Automated testing. We scan a representative sample of publicly accessible pages — always including high-consequence workflow pages such as contact, appointment, intake, donation, or payment forms where the site has them and they are reachable without authentication — using the axe-core testing engine. PDF documents are validated against PDF/UA-1 using veraPDF. Workflow pages that exist but sit behind logins or multi-step flows a crawler cannot traverse are listed as not-assessed in the report scope: the claim never exceeds the scan.

Structured expert review. A human reviewer applying this published methodology examines findings, removes false positives, deduplicates template-level issues (one broken navigation component repeated on 200 pages is one fix, not 200), and evaluates criteria that automated tools cannot reliably judge.

Third-party content. Where a page embeds content the organization cannot control — maps, payment iframes, social widgets — that content is identified in the report scope and excluded from any conformance claim. We assess what the organization can fix.

What we do not use: accessibility overlay widgets. We do not sell, install, or accept them as remediation. Overlays alter a page's presentation through injected scripts; they do not fix underlying code, and overlay vendors' compliance claims have drawn regulatory scrutiny. A site relying on an overlay to meet this methodology will not pass verification.

Available today — the assessment. Request an assessment at /assessment with your organization, website, contact, and industry. We run the automated scan plus structured review — typically 2–3 business days, reviewed by a person, not returned by a widget — and email you a findings report. If the report shows issues, it itemizes exactly what to fix.

Launching soon — accreditation. When the recognition program opens, the path to the standing will be:

1. Qualification — a site qualifies when it has no open critical or serious findings across the covered success criteria at the time of assessment.
2. Re-assessment in full after any remediation.
3. Verification decision — a reviewer confirms the threshold is met and issues the standing.
4. Publication — the verified badge, a public verification page, and a directory listing.

Confidentiality, from day one. Only issued standings will ever be published. Assessment results for organizations that have not earned verification — including the findings data we generate about their sites, which is sensitive by nature — are confidential to the applicant and appear nowhere on this site or in any future directory. Requesting an assessment tells the world nothing; only earning the standing will.

Every verification page and report issued under the program Launching soon will carry this exact form:

Verified [date]: [organization]'s website [domain] conformed to the WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria covered by the Uplift Accredited methodology (v[X]) at the time of assessment, as determined by automated testing and structured expert review of a representative sample of publicly accessible pages. This verification does not constitute a guarantee of full WCAG conformance, of accessibility to all users, or of compliance with any law.

The verification page will state the assessed domain, exactly which pages were assessed, any workflow pages not reachable, any third-party content exclusions, whether PDFs were assessed, the methodology version, and the verification and expiration dates. What we assess is what we vouch for — nothing more.

Once issued, a standing Launching soon will be valid for 12 months from the verification date. Websites change constantly; a permanent accessibility badge would be meaningless within months, which is why ours will expire. Renewal will require a full reassessment under the then-current methodology, with notice ahead of expiration. An expired standing shows as Expired, and the live badge reflects the change automatically.

A standing that cannot be lost is decoration. Ours will be losable. Under the program Launching soon a standing is monitored for the life of its 12-month term through renewal reassessment and ongoing checks.

A standing may be revoked for an uncured barrier that would have failed verification, material regression, misleading badge display, or misrepresentation. Revocation is a decision made by a person, with written notice and an opportunity to cure a curable barrier first. On revocation the badge deactivates everywhere and the verification page shows Revoked — the page stays published. We won't delete history.

The Uplift Accredited badge Launching soon will be served from our systems in real time — never a static image file. Every badge shows the organization's current status and links to its public verification page. If a standing expires or is revoked, every embedded badge reflects that automatically. A static badge would be a way to keep displaying a standing that no longer holds; we won't issue one.

Organizations whose sites need work may fix issues internally or hire any vendor they choose. ClearPath Access offers remediation services and has a business relationship with this program. Because of that relationship we hold ourselves to extra disclosure:

• Any verification page for an organization whose remediation was performed by ClearPath Access will say so, plainly.
• Verification is assessed against this published methodology regardless of who performed the work. Purchasing remediation will not purchase the standing — sites that don't meet the threshold don't pass, whoever did the work.
• As the program's capacity grows, verification and complaint reviews for ClearPath-remediated sites will be routed to a reviewer independent of the remediation work.

The assessment and findings report are free. We scan your website, apply structured human review, and send you the report at no cost. There is nothing to buy to receive it.

When the recognition program Launching soon opens, earning and displaying the standing will remain free as well. What we do not do is sell an outcome: a site that doesn't meet the standard doesn't pass, and no payment changes that. Organizations that need remediation may fix issues themselves or hire any vendor they choose (see section 9).

This methodology is versioned. Material changes increment the version, are recorded in the changelog, and will apply to new assessments and renewals — not retroactively to standings already issued. Organizations will be notified of material changes at renewal.