Most accessibility statements get written by someone who was not in the room when the checks were run.
That is the whole problem. The statement is a public claim about the product, and in many markets it is a legal one. But it usually gets composed at the end, from memory, from a half-remembered audit, from a screenshot someone pasted into a ticket four months ago. Nobody is lying. The evidence just never existed in a form anyone could check.
We hit this while building a11ytrail, our open-source accessibility tooling, and the design decision that mattered was not the checking. It was inverting the direction of authorship.
Every check gets recorded as evidence: who ran it, when, what was checked, what the result was. Automated scan and manual review are both first class. A human confirming keyboard navigation on a component is evidence in exactly the same shape as a rule engine flagging a contrast failure.
Then the statement is generated from that record. A sentence claiming conformance for a criterion can only appear if evidence supports it. If nobody checked it, the statement cannot say it was checked. If the last check was a year ago against a page that has since been rebuilt, that shows.
The generator is not allowed to be more confident than the audit trail.
What this changes in practice is unglamorous and useful. The gap between what you claim and what you verified stops being invisible. It becomes a diff, and someone can look at it before a regulator, a customer, or a user with a screen reader does.
The general shape probably applies well outside accessibility. Compliance reports, security questionnaires, SLA claims: anywhere a document asserts something about a system, the document should be downstream of recorded evidence, not upstream of it. Prose is easy to write and impossible to audit.
If you publish an accessibility statement, it is worth knowing what it is actually generated from today, and whether you could reconstruct the checks behind any single sentence in it.