A free website accessibility checker for every page

What a website accessibility check actually tests

An accessibility check examines your site the way assistive technology and an automated auditor do: it looks for the concrete, measurable failures that lock real people out. Everything below is a check the scan genuinely runs — no accessibility tool earns trust by claiming more than it does. Here is exactly what gets examined when you check a website with us.

Color contrast

Text has to stand out from what is behind it. We measure the contrast ratio of your text against its background and flag anything that falls below the threshold a reader with low vision needs — WCAG's 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Low contrast is the single most common accessibility failure on the web, and it usually traces to one brand color used somewhere it was never tested.

Images and alternative text

A screen reader cannot describe an image that has no description. We find images with no alt attribute and count them across every page we crawl, so you know the real scale of the job rather than assuming it is one stray graphic. The check tells you where the gaps are; writing alt text that actually conveys the image is the human half of the work, and we say so. To spot-check a single page as you write it, the alt text checker lists every image on a URL beside the alt attribute it currently has.

Forms, labels and controls

Every input, button and link needs a name a machine can announce. We flag unlabeled form fields, buttons and links with no accessible name, duplicated labels, and tab order that traps a keyboard user on an element they cannot escape. These are the failures that make a contact form or a checkout impossible to complete without a mouse — and they are invisible to a sighted tester who never puts the mouse down.

Document structure and semantics

The invisible scaffolding of a page is what lets a screen-reader user move through it. We check for a valid language attribute so the right voice reads your page, a heading order that does not skip levels, lists marked up as lists rather than faked with dashes, and ARIA attributes that are valid rather than merely present — because a broken ARIA role is worse than none at all.

What automated accessibility testing can and cannot find

This is the part most accessibility tools stay quiet about, so we will not. Automated testing reliably catches the machine-detectable failures — the contrast ratios, the missing attributes, the absent labels above. It cannot judge the things that need a human: whether your alt text is meaningful or just present, whether the reading order makes sense, whether a custom widget is genuinely operable by keyboard. Researchers commonly estimate that automated tools surface somewhere around a third of all WCAG issues.

So treat a clean score for what it is: a strong, fast first pass that removes the most common and most mechanical barriers, not a finish line. Be especially wary of any product that promises "one-click" or "fully compliant" accessibility from a script you paste in — overlays of that kind are widely criticized by disabled users and have not stopped the lawsuits they claim to prevent. Real compliance comes from fixing the code and testing with actual assistive technology. This check gets you through the machine-detectable half quickly and honestly, and points you at what is left.

WCAG, ADA and the standard behind the score

The accessibility score is built on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — WCAG 2.2, the current version, at conformance levels A and AA. WCAG is organized around four principles: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. Every check the scan runs maps to a specific success criterion under one of those principles, which is why each finding can name the exact guideline it breaks.

The laws people worry about mostly defer to WCAG rather than defining their own rules. In the United States, courts applying the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to websites routinely treat WCAG 2.1/2.2 level AA as the practical benchmark, and Section 508 references WCAG directly for federal sites. The EU's EN 301 549 and Ontario's AODA do the same. Meeting the automatable WCAG AA criteria does not make you immune from a complaint, but failing them is the fastest way to attract one.

Why an accessible site is also better for SEO

Accessibility and search optimization are the same discipline viewed from two angles: both reward a page that a machine can parse without guessing. The alt text a screen reader announces is the alt text Google reads to understand an image. The heading order that lets a keyboard user skim is the outline a crawler uses to work out what the page is about. Labeled controls, a declared language and descriptive link text help assistive technology and search engines in the same motion.

That overlap is why accessibility is not a separate scan here — it is a scored category inside the full audit, sitting next to your website SEO check and your AI search visibility. Fixing an accessibility issue frequently lifts the technical-SEO side of your score at the same time, and it widens the audience that can use the site at all — around one in six people live with a disability.

Checking one page, or every page

Most free accessibility checkers test the single URL you paste and stop there. That is useful when you are working on one page, but it misses the category of problem that actually defines an inaccessible site: the failure baked into a template and repeated everywhere. A low-contrast button in your header is not one issue — it is one issue on every page that renders the header.

So this checker crawls. You get the per-page detail and the site-wide count, and the report tells you which findings are template-level so you can fix them once and clear them everywhere. That count is also the honest measure of the work ahead: "forty images with no alt text" is a very different afternoon from "one".

How to fix what the check finds

Every finding is ranked by severity and paired with the WCAG success criterion it breaks and a specific, plain-English fix — not a standards citation you then have to go and decode. Contrast failures come with the ratio you have and the ratio you need; a missing label comes with where to add it. Work the list from the top, clear the template-level issues first because they pay off on every page at once, then re-run the check to confirm the count has dropped. When you are ready to go beyond what a machine can see, the next step is testing with a screen reader and keyboard — which is the honest way to close the remaining gap.