Accessibility Handover Notes: What to Document When a Client Changes Agencies
When a store changes agencies, its accessibility history usually walks out the door. The handover notes that keep fixes, risks, and evidence intact across the move.
Stores change agencies for ordinary reasons: growth, cost, a new direction. What should not change is the record of what was broken, what was fixed, and what is still open. In practice that record lives in old tickets, a departed developer's memory, and a scan report nobody can find, and the new agency starts from zero while the old barriers quietly return.
A short accessibility handover note prevents that. It is not a sales document and it is not a full audit. It is a factual summary the outgoing team can write in an afternoon and the incoming team will actually thank them for.
List the fixes, not just the findings
Findings age badly, fixes matter. Record which template level barriers were fixed, where in the theme the fix lives, and which apps were configured or replaced for accessibility reasons. That last point saves real money: without it, a new team reinstalls the same chat widget the old team removed, and the barrier is back within a week of the handover.
Name the open risks plainly
Every store has known open items: a vendor who has not fixed a widget, a checkout extension that cannot be fully tested, a backlog of image descriptions. List them with their age and their owner. A handover that only reports good news sets the new team up to be surprised by the first scan, and it makes the store owner wonder what else was smoothed over.
Hand over the evidence file
Pass along prior audits, scan baselines, any demand letters and responses, and remediation logs with dates. This file is the store's legal memory. If a claim arrives six months after the move, the owner needs to show what was done and when, and that story spans both agencies. Agree who keeps the originals and make sure the store owner holds a copy, not just the agencies.
Agree a baseline scan in the first month
The cleanest handovers end with a fresh baseline scan run by the incoming team in the first month, compared against the outgoing team's last report. Differences get discussed while both sides still remember the work. That single step turns handover from a document into a verified transfer, and it protects everyone, including the agency leaving.
Store owners can help by making the handover note a contracted deliverable in the offboarding agreement, with a date attached, rather than a favor requested at the end. When it is contracted, it gets written properly, reviewed, and filed with the store's other records, and the incoming team can plan its first month around facts instead of discoveries. It is a small clause that prevents a disproportionate amount of duplicated work, repeated mistakes, and avoidable exposure for a store that has already paid once to learn those lessons the hard way.
Related reading
If this topic is useful, these earlier guides go deeper on connected questions: Accessible Product Videos: Captions, Transcripts, and Audio Choices for Agency Clients, Accessibility Checks for Shopify Markets: Multi Language and Multi Region Stores, and Accessible Announcement Bars and Promo Banners on Shopify Stores.
Frequently asked questions
Who should write the accessibility handover note?
The outgoing agency, as part of offboarding, with the store owner receiving the final copy. It should be factual and short: fixes made, open items, evidence locations, and any vendor issues still in flight.
What is the most commonly lost item in a handover?
The reason behind a choice: why an app was removed, why a design pattern was changed, why a vendor was put on notice. Without the reason, new teams undo fixes while believing they are improving the site.
Should open accessibility risks delay a change of agency?
No. Open risks are normal. They should be documented and priced into the new team's early work, not hidden. A documented risk is manageable. A discovered one feels like a betrayal.
How long should a handover note be?
Two or three pages is enough for most stores, plus links to the evidence file. Length is not the goal. A new developer should be able to read it in twenty minutes and know exactly where things stand.