Yes, you may conduct and document your own accessibility assessment yourself. Nowhere in the regulations does it state that this may only be done by an external auditor or certified party. What matters is that you can show what you tested, on what date, with what results, and what steps followed from that. This demonstrability is what regulators look at, not the question of who pressed the button.
The practical boundary does not lie at 'self or outsourced', but at what there is to test. Part of the requirements in EN 301 549 can be checked with an automated scan: color contrast, the presence or absence of alt text, the structure of headings, the presence of form labels. Another part requires human judgment: does an alt text read logically in context, does the focus order match the visual order, is a form error message understandable to a screen reader. This distinction determines what you can reasonably tick off yourself and what deserves further explanation.
What 'own assessment' means in practice
The own assessment is not a single document but a sum of parts: an overview of the pages and flows that were tested, the standard used (in practice WCAG 2.1 level AA), the issues found, and an estimate of what has since been resolved and what remains open. That overview should form the basis of the accessibility statement you publish, and it is precisely the part that a regulator can request first.
Whether you compile that overview yourself or have it compiled is up to you. What matters is that the substantiation holds up: that someone reading it can follow what was checked and on what basis you reached a conclusion. A casual glance at the homepage, without documentation, is not an assessment in the sense the law intends.
What you can reasonably do yourself
For measurable requirements — contrast, alt texts, labels, heading structure, the presence of a focus indicator — an automated scan can do much of the work for you and document it clearly. That is precisely what a tool like the free quick-scan that gives you insight in a few minutes is intended for: it tests what is testable and explicitly shows what it cannot assess. That last addition is not small print at the bottom; it is a structural part of every report, because an automated test simply cannot see everything that a user with assistive technology encounters.
In addition, there is the maintenance part of your own assessment: every time you change something on the site, the status of your assessment changes in principle. This is not legal hair-splitting but a practical consequence — a new checkout flow or a redesigned contact form is not automatically as accessible as the previous version. If you want to track this process repeatedly yourself, you benefit from a consistent way of documenting it rather than a one-time exercise.
Where self-assessment becomes harder
The parts that require human judgment are precisely the parts where most uncertainty arises: is this alt text functional or decorative, can this button be operated without a mouse, does the aria-live region work as intended with a screen reader. Such questions cannot be conclusively answered with an automated scan, and that applies to every scanning system, not just ours. If you want certainty here, you will at some point need someone who actually navigates the page with a screen reader or using only a keyboard.
Axessia does not perform that manual testing work itself and does not repair code either; we test what is testable, prioritize the outcome in plain language, document the assessment and alert you when a change to your site requires a fresh review. For everything else — and for the question of what constitutes sufficient substantiation in your specific situation — we refer you to a legal advisor or to the market surveillance authority in your country. In the knowledge base with topics organized by situation you will find the background on which standards precisely apply and what the declaration must meet.
Start by doing it yourself, not as the end goal
Most entrepreneurs begin on their own: a scan, an overview of the issues, a first version of the declaration. That is a fine start and for some of the requirements also sufficient. Where it typically gets stuck is usually not with the willingness to do it yourself, but with the question of how you document something in a way that holds up if it is ever questioned. On the page where you can read where our information comes from is how we build that documentation, including the explicit mention of what a scan cannot see.
Would you first like to know where your own site stands, without immediately investing in a system for it? Do the free quick-scan or read through the topics in the knowledge base — that will give you an honest picture within half an hour of what can be tested automatically and what still requires a human eye.