About Latchkey
The accessibility vendor that publishes what its own testing missed
Latchkey is a WCAG 2.2 AA-based remediation platform, currently a private beta. This page is about the thesis rather than the company, because on a product this young the thesis is the part worth reading: what we measure, what we refuse to say, and which of our own claims are enforced by our own build rather than by good intentions.
The bet
Publishing what automated testing did not cover is worth more than claiming it covered everything
The overlay market spent a decade selling the second thing, and a regulator eventually took it apart. We think the first thing is a better product as well as a safer one: a named list of the rules nobody has checked yet is a work plan, and a report that implies there is nothing left to do is a report that gets someone in trouble later.
What we design around
Why this category needed a different bet
Four things happened to the incumbent overlay vendor. None of them was a bug. Each one traces back to a sentence in a marketing page, which is why our marketing has a build gate on it.
None of that is an argument that an overlay is useless. It is an argument about what a vendor is allowed to say about one, and it is the reason this company is organised around evidence rather than assurances.
Differences, not superlatives
What we do differently
Four mechanisms, all of them real and all of them in the repository that builds this site. Two of them exist specifically to fail our own release, which is the only kind of promise a reader can verify without taking our word for anything.
Every fix carries a label
Deterministic when the fix follows from the markup. Inferred when it was proposed from surrounding context and cleared a refusal gate. Declined when neither holds, and a declined fix is handed to you as needing a person rather than guessed at. A confident wrong aria-label misleads screen-reader users for years; a missing one gets caught by the next audit.
Every site gets a coverage table that names rules, not counts
The table lists the rules that ran and the rules that did not, by name, for that site. Automated checks cover roughly one third of WCAG success criteria, so the part that was never examined is the more useful half of the report: a percentage tells you nothing you can act on, a named untested rule is a work item.
A claim linter can fail this build
The copy you are reading went through it. It matches claim shapes rather than banned words, so the product can still describe what a regulation requires and can still ask the question a visitor actually has, while the build fails on an assertion that software delivered a legal outcome, a guarantee of an outcome, a promise about litigation, or a claim of total coverage. The sentences the product is required to carry are allowlisted, which is what stops a gate like this from being switched off the first time it blocks something true.
axe runs against our own pages, and a violation stops the release
Every route, in every designed state, at 1200, 375 and 320 pixels wide, with 320 there because that is where WCAG reflow is stated and where a sticky bar starts covering something. A state the harness could not reach is reported as skipped rather than counted as a pass, because a gate that prints a green line for a screen it never loaded is worse than no gate at all.
Three more, which are choices rather than features
We publish Flow prices.
Credentials arrive per scan and are never persisted.
Screenshots are treated as production data.
Stated plainly
What we will not sell you
- A stamp for your footer
- We do not certify compliance, and no vendor can. What we produce is an accessibility statement and a conformance report: dated documents that say what was tested, with what, and what was found.
- Cover for a lawsuit
- We do not indemnify you or pay legal fees. The Evidence Pack is a dated, hashed record of the work that was actually done, which is a different product from an assurance and the only one of the two we think a vendor can honestly sell.
- A verdict on your site
- Compliance is a legal determination, not a product feature. Our result screens carry three status strings (BARRIERS FOUND, NEEDS REVIEW and NO AUTOMATED FAILURES) and not one of them is a statement about the law.
- Total coverage
- Roughly two thirds of WCAG success criteria cannot be decided by a machine at all: reading order, whether alt text is any good, whether an error message makes sense read aloud. Those need a person, which is why Services is a product line rather than an upsell invented for this page.
The product line
Four things we ship, and one standard behind them
Widget
See WidgetFlow
See FlowFree scanner
Scan a page freeServices
See Services
Private beta
What this page does not have
No testimonials, no customer logos, no review badges, no headcount, no funding announcement, no awards and no photographs of an office. Latchkey is a private beta, so all of those would have to be written rather than reported, and a vendor whose pitch is honesty about coverage cannot open with invented proof.
There is no founding date here either, for the plainer reason that there is nothing yet worth marking. When there are customers who will say something on the record, this page will quote them and name them. Until then the honest version of an about page is the argument, the mechanisms, and the things we have decided not to say.
Read the limitations page before you read the pricing page
It is the fastest way to find out whether we are the right vendor for you. Some readers will decide we are not, and for a site whose real problems live in the two thirds automation cannot see, that is the correct outcome.