Website accessibility test
Find the accessibility problems a machine can find reliably, and get told plainly which ones it cannot. One URL, no account.
The free run covers markup and metadata. Contrast, focus order and landmark checks need a browser, so they start on a monitored site.
What this test actually finds
Automated checks reliably catch about a third of WCAG failures — the mechanical ones. That third is worth clearing, because it is the cheapest and it is what an automated audit against you would find first. The rest needs a person, and this report says which is which.
- Contrast
Text below 4.5:1 against its actual composited background.
- Names and labels
Inputs, buttons and links that no screen reader can announce.
- Keyboard path
Focus order, visible focus, and anything reachable only by mouse.
- Structure
Headings, landmarks and lists used as layout rather than meaning.
- Alternative text
Missing, and the worse case — decorative images described anyway.
What a result looks like
14 of them are the same button component.
Clean across all 240 pages crawled.
All three in the newsletter form.
Findings are grouped by the component that causes them, because seventeen contrast failures are usually one button fixed once. We publish no compliance score: a number implies a verdict that an automated test is not entitled to give.
A test tells you about today. Monitoring tells you at 04:00.
Accessibility regresses one component at a time — a brand refresh drops contrast, a new form ships without labels, a modal traps focus. An annual audit finds it eleven months late. Monitoring re-checks after every change and attributes the regression to the release that introduced it.
Common questions
- Is this the same engine as the paid monitoring?
- Yes — the same checks, run the same way. The difference is that monitoring repeats them on a schedule and keeps the history, which is what turns a number into a trend and a trend into an alert.
- Does testing my site slow it down or change anything?
- No. Everything is read from the outside, the way a visitor arrives — no agent, no script on your pages, nothing written. Our requests identify themselves so you can recognise them in your own logs.
- If this passes, are we compliant with WCAG or the European Accessibility Act?
- No, and any tool that says otherwise is selling you something. Automated testing covers the mechanical subset. Clearing it is real progress and a real defence, but compliance needs manual testing with assistive technology, and usually a statement you can stand behind.
- Why do I get more issues here than from a browser extension?
- Extensions test the page in front of you. We crawl the templates behind it, so one failing component appears once per page it renders on — which is also why the findings are grouped by component rather than by URL.
Related tests
A free test is a snapshot. Monitoring is the product.