Free Accessibility Tools

Which tool should you reach for?

These overlap deliberately, because accessibility work happens at three different moments and each one wants a different tool. The contrast checker is for a design decision you are making right now: you have two colours and you need to know whether that pairing is allowed before it reaches a stylesheet. The site scanner is for finding out what is already wrong across pages you have shipped. The statement generator is for the moment after that, when you need to publish what your position actually is.

If you are starting from nothing, run the scanner first. A prioritised list of real failures on your real pages tells you more in five minutes than any amount of reading about WCAG.

What automated testing can and cannot find

It is worth being straight about this, because tools that imply otherwise cause real harm. Automated checks reliably catch the machine-decidable failures: missing alternative text, insufficient colour contrast, form inputs with no label, invalid ARIA, images and controls with no accessible name, heading structures that skip levels. That is a meaningful share of what typically goes wrong, and it is the part you can fix quickly and verify objectively.

What no scanner can judge is whether your alt text is useful, whether your tab order follows the visual order in a way that makes sense, whether an error message actually explains how to recover, or whether a custom widget behaves sensibly with a screen reader. Those need a person, and ideally a person who uses assistive technology. Treat an automated pass as the floor rather than the finish line — it clears the mechanical failures so that human testing time is spent on the judgement calls only a human can make.

Questions about these tools

Do these tools require an account?

No. The contrast checker and the statement generator run entirely in your browser, and the site scanner emails your results without asking you to create anything.

Which WCAG version do the tools test against?

WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 at level AA, which is the level referenced by the major accessibility regulations. AAA exists but is not what any of them require of a general-purpose website.

Can I scan a site I do not own?

Yes. The scanner works against the live public version of a site, which is why agencies use it to assess a prospect's site before quoting.

Does passing an automated scan make me legally compliant?

No, and be wary of anything that claims it does. A clean automated scan means the machine-checkable failures are gone. Compliance also depends on the parts only manual testing reaches. What a clean scan gives you is a defensible, documented baseline and a much shorter list for a human reviewer.