There is no fixed deadline for an improvement plan. The regulation requires you to identify and remedy accessibility issues, but does not specify how many weeks or months this must take. In practice, the timeline depends on three things: how many issues there are, who resolves them, and how that person or organisation fits this alongside ongoing work.
What is fixed, however, is the sequence. First you identify the issues, then you prioritise them, then you resolve them, and then you document what has been done and what remains outstanding. Each phase has its own pace, and it is precisely the transitions between these phases where projects tend to stall in practice.
The mapping phase usually moves quickly
A scan of core pages and key workflows — checkout flow, login flow, contact form — typically takes days, not weeks. Automated testing identifies a substantial portion of common issues: missing alternative text, form fields without labels, insufficient contrast. Some requirements cannot be tested automatically and this is noted in every report; those issues require someone to review the page directly. If you want to first understand whether this is relevant to your organisation before investing time in a scan, then a brief questionnaire with direct indication provides that clarity.
Prioritisation takes time, not because it is difficult, but because it requires decisions
An action list with ten to thirty items looks manageable, but each item requires a decision: who takes ownership, when, and how urgent is it compared to other work. This is the phase where many projects slow down — not because of the technical side, but because no one internally owns the list. An action list in plain language, without WCAG jargon, helps here: an office manager or HR lead does not need to know what an ARIA label is to understand that the contact form has a problem. What often delays prioritisation is not the content but the absence of a clear deadline for each item — precisely what an improvement plan with deadlines is designed for.
Implementation depends on the developer, not on the regulation
The actual repair — adjusting code, writing alt text, increasing contrast — lies outside the scope of what a testing service does. Axessia tests, prioritises, documents and monitors, but does not carry out repair work. The duration of this phase therefore depends on the capacity of your own developer or the organisation managing your site, and on how those fixes fit into a sprint or schedule. With a webshop using a standard template this can be done within several weeks; with custom development and a complex checkout flow this can take longer, extending to months, especially if the fixes affect the checkout or login flow and therefore require additional testing cycles.
This is also where the overlay widget trap lies: it promises a quick fix within a day, but does not meet the underlying requirement and changes nothing in the underlying code. Whoever gains time with an overlay will lose it later when it becomes clear that the issues are still there.
Documentation and declaration is the shortest step, provided the rest is correct
Once the issues have been resolved, drawing up the declaration itself is relatively quick — it is mainly a matter of properly documenting your own assessment. This step only stalls if the previous steps have not been properly documented: without a demonstrable assessment there is nothing on which to base the declaration. More on what is needed for this can be found in the knowledge base by topic.
And then: every change opens the cycle again
The biggest misconception about implementation time is that the process ends when the accessibility statement is published. A new page, an adjusted checkout process, or another theme update can introduce new issues, causing the cycle of testing, prioritizing, and fixing to start again. That makes the question "how long does it take" actually a question about a recurring process rather than a one-off project.
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