An audit report and a platform report serve different purposes. An audit report is a document produced after a professional evaluation of a website or application against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) conformance criteria. A platform report is generated by an accessibility compliance management platform to track the status of identified issues, remediation progress, and overall conformance posture over time.
| Key Point | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Source | An audit report comes from an accessibility evaluation conducted by a professional. A platform report is generated by compliance management software. |
| Purpose | Audit reports document what issues exist. Platform reports track what has been done about them. |
| Frequency | Audit reports are produced once per evaluation cycle. Platform reports update continuously as data changes. |
| Audience | Audit reports are typically shared with development teams and procurement contacts. Platform reports serve project managers and compliance leads. |
What an Audit Report Contains
An audit report is the primary deliverable from an accessibility evaluation. It lists every issue identified during the assessment, mapped to specific WCAG success criteria at a defined conformance level (such as 2.1 AA or 2.2 AA).
Each entry in an audit report typically includes the page or screen where the issue was identified, a description of the issue, the WCAG criterion it relates to, and a recommended remediation approach. The report reflects a point-in-time snapshot of a product’s conformance status.
Because audits are conducted by accessibility professionals who evaluate pages using screen readers, keyboards, code inspection, and visual review, the audit report captures issues that automated scans cannot detect. Automated scans only flag approximately 25% of accessibility issues, so the remaining 75% appears exclusively in audit reports.
What a Platform Report Contains
A platform report is generated within a compliance management platform where teams log, assign, and track accessibility issues. These reports pull from live project data rather than a single evaluation event.
Platform reports typically show open versus resolved issues, remediation velocity, conformance percentage by page or component, and trend data over time. Some platforms include scan results as one data input alongside manually identified issues imported from audit reports.
The value of a platform report is its ongoing nature. Where an audit report tells you where things stood at the time of evaluation, a platform report shows where things stand right now and how the trajectory looks.
How the Two Reports Work Together
Audit reports feed platform reports. After an evaluation is completed, the issues identified in the audit report are imported into the compliance platform. From there, those issues become trackable items with owners, statuses, and deadlines.
As teams remediate issues and new scan data comes in, the platform report reflects updated conformance status. When the next audit cycle occurs, a fresh audit report resets the baseline, and the process repeats.
Organizations that rely on only one type of report miss part of the picture. An audit report without a platform to track remediation leaves teams without visibility into progress. A platform report without periodic audit data risks tracking an incomplete set of issues, since scans alone cover only a fraction of WCAG criteria.
Choosing What to Prioritize
For organizations starting an accessibility program, the audit report comes first. It establishes the full scope of conformance shortfalls. The platform report becomes valuable once there are issues to track and a team actively working on remediation.
Both report types are standard components of a mature accessibility program, each answering a different question: what exists versus what has changed.