IAAP says the application form takes ten to fifteen minutes. That is true, and it is not the work. The writing behind it took me about thirty hours over two weeks, and most of those hours went to deciding what I was not allowed to say.
What the application is.
The WAS is IAAP’s Web Accessibility Specialist certification. The application is seventeen free-text boxes, each capped at 2,500 characters, spread across three domains: creating accessible web solutions, identifying accessibility issues, and remediating them. Every box opens with a header naming the role, the organization, and the timeframe, and then asks you to describe what you did, written as if you were talking to a hiring manager.
One instruction sits on the worksheet in plain language: do not use AI to generate your responses, describe your real-life experience in your own words. Every word in all seventeen boxes is mine. I used Claude the way I would use a research assistant, for character counts, for finding which of my own repositories held the evidence for a given box, and for tracking which artifact I had already spent somewhere else.
The format asks what you did, not what you know, and IAAP excludes teaching, coaching, training, and coursework. That rules out a good deal of what I do in a normal month. The boxes only wanted the work.
The fifteen minutes is real.
I want to be fair to the estimate, because I think it is honest. IAAP’s ten to fifteen minutes covers pasting finished answers into the portal once the worksheet is done. If your answers are written, that is about right.
The worksheet is where the work lives. Seventeen boxes, 2,500 characters each, written against a Body of Knowledge that lists study tasks per subdomain. The first box alone (guidelines, principles, and techniques) has twenty-two study tasks behind it. At 2,500 characters, that is about 113 characters per task if you tried to touch them all, which is a sentence fragment each. Nobody covers them all. Picking which eight to answer with real decisions, and leaving the rest uncovered on purpose, is itself an hour of thinking.
Where the hours went.
Almost none of it was typing.
Finding the evidence. Each box needed real artifacts with dates: a commit in my theme, a check in my audit engine, the publish-time gate plugin I built when no third-party plugin would fire at the data layer, a scan from the free site health scanner. I know what I built. Reconstructing when I built it, and what failure it prevented, is a different job.
Not repeating myself. The same artifact can appear in more than one box only if the reasoning differs and the sentences do not repeat. Seventeen boxes means seventeen chances to accidentally tell the same story twice, so I had to track what each box had already spent. That constraint is what makes the work grow faster than the box count.
The character budget. A reason costs about 250 characters. A named item costs 40 to 70. So one or two items per box get a “without this, the user would have hit X,” and the rest are named without one. Every box is a small editing problem before it is a writing problem.
Rework, some of it avoidable. The rule that decides how you allocate all of this (that you must clearly communicate three years of experience in the subdomains marked as required) appears on page four of the live application, not on the worksheet, and the worksheet does not mark which subdomains are required. I had already allocated my evidence by the time I read it, so I went back through the required boxes at the end. I wrote that down, with a few smaller items, to send back to IAAP.
Most of it was cutting my own claims.
This is the part I did not expect, and it is the reason I am writing the post.
An applicant is motivated to round up. The format fights that, because every claim carries a role, an organization, and a timeframe, which makes a vague claim harder to write than an accurate one. Four examples from my own two weeks:
- The WCAG version. My audits ran to 2.1. My engine’s default is 2.2 AA. bekee.com’s own stated target is 2.1 AA. Those are three separate claims and it would have been easy to blur them into “I audit to 2.2.” They stayed separate.
- The theme. I chose a theme carrying WordPress.org’s accessibility-ready tag. That is a selection criterion, not a verification. I have never evaluated that vendor’s conformance report, so I cannot say I tested a site built on it to conformance, and I did not.
- The screen readers. I have no Windows machine, which means no JAWS and no NVDA. What I actually test with is VoiceOver on macOS and VoiceOver on my own iPhone, including the fifteen list-markup variants I ran on a staging page last month. The boxes say that, and they do not say more.
- The teaching. Some of the accessibility work I am most useful at is showing a nonprofit’s staff how to write alt text. IAAP excludes teaching, so it is not in the application at all.
Why any of this matters if you are hiring.
Accessibility is a field where nobody can see the work. A client cannot tell from the outside whether a site was tested with a screen reader or waved at by a browser extension, which is exactly why the overlay industry sells as well as it does.
So the useful question to ask a practitioner is not whether they are certified. It is whether they will tell you what they did not check. My accessibility page lists what my audit covers and what it does not, lane by lane, and it is the page I update first when the engine changes. Writing seventeen boxes against a body of knowledge was the same exercise at four times the length: the claim I can defend is worth more than the bigger one I cannot.
Where it stands.
I submitted the application on Tuesday, September 15, the day before applications closed. IAAP replies within five business days, so I should know by about September 22. If they approve me, the exam fee is $555, and sitting the exam is a separate decision I have not made yet.
That is the price of the exam. The application has its own price and it is not money, which is the number I went looking for before I started and could not find anywhere. It is about thirty hours, and almost all of it is evidence.
I am not going to tell you I passed something I have not taken. I will tell you what it took to apply.
