What are the Simplest Tools to Check My Website for Accessibility?

What are the simplest tools to check your website for accessibility?

Start with a free automated scanner, then verify what it finds with human testing. Automated tools catch common accessibility issues in seconds. People catch everything else. 

Automated tools like Google Lighthouse and WAVE are good starting places. Lighthouse is built into Chrome, so there is nothing to install. WAVE is a free browser extension that marks up your page and shows where accessibility problems are. Both are free and neither one requires you to be a developer. 

What they find are roughly 30-50% of accessibility issues, things like missing image alt text, low color contrast, unlabeled form fields, vague link text, skipped heading levels, and missing keyboard focus indicators. Those are common issues on the web and are the ones software is genuinely good at catching.

Take AudioEye for example. The free checker scans your page, detects common issues, and provides recommendations for fixes. Some are automatically fixed via the platform’s automation. 

However, detecting and fixing an issue are two different jobs, and automated tools only detect 30-50% of issues. The rest require human judgment. 

A scanner can detect that alt text exists but it can’t tell you how helpful the alt text is. It can confirm that a form field has a label, but it can’t tell you if the label makes sense to someone who cannot see the form. It can flag a heading structure but it can’t tell you if the page reads logically. 

Those issues require human judgment. Certified experts can test your site the way someone with a disability actually uses it, typically with screen readers, keyboard navigation, and other assistive technology. These experts confirm real people can complete real tasks, not just that a scan came back clean.