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The checks you can run right now, free.

17 free tools to test a page, check your content, or prepare for an audit. No installation needed. The website scan requires a free account. Every tool explains its limits and what still needs a person. Learn how we run an audit by hand.

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17 of 17 tools

  • Scanner

    Free 10-page scan

    Scan up to 10 pages for automated accessibility evidence with a free account.

    What it checks & its limits: Free 10-page scan

    With a free account, scan up to ten of your pages, each loaded in a real browser and checked against all 90 supported automated rules. Findings include rule evidence and a fix guide when a verified match is available. The report keeps 27 best-practice checks separate from the 63 WCAG-mapped checks, which touch only 20 of the 55 criteria at Level A and AA.

    Open tool: Free 10-page scan

  • Helper

    Find the rule from what broke

    Describe the problem in plain words and find the WCAG rule it breaks.

    What it checks & its limits: Find the rule from what broke

    Every WCAG reference is organized by rule number, which is useful once you know the number. People arrive holding a symptom instead, so describe what is going wrong in the words you would say out loud and this searches the documented failures behind all 86 criteria to find where it belongs.

    Open tool: Find the rule from what broke

  • Helper

    Which laws apply to you

    Answer two questions to see which of the 38 laws we cover can reach you.

    What it checks & its limits: Which laws apply to you

    Two questions, where you sell and what kind of organization you are, narrow 38 accessibility laws down to the handful that can reach you. Treat the result as a filter rather than an answer, because each law page carries the scope, the size thresholds and the dates that actually decide it.

    Open tool: Which laws apply to you

  • Checker

    ARIA validator

    Paste markup to find invalid roles, missing states, and attributes in the wrong place.

    What it checks & its limits: ARIA validator

    Paste a component and check it against the ARIA model. It finds invalid roles, the abstract ones no browser implements, roles missing a state they oblige you to supply, roles sitting outside the parent they need, and attributes that do not belong on the role you used. It reads markup, so it tells you your ARIA is valid rather than that it is true.

    Open tool: ARIA validator

  • Checker

    Contrast checker

    Test one text and background pair against every WCAG threshold at once.

    What it checks & its limits: Contrast checker

    Pick a text color and a background and read the ratio against all four thresholds together. 4.5 to 1 for body text at AA, 3 to 1 for large text, 3 to 1 again for borders, icons and focus rings under the separate non-text rule, and 7 to 1 at AAA. A live preview shows you the pair at the sizes those thresholds are about.

    Open tool: Contrast checker

  • Generator

    Accessible palette builder

    Enter your brand color and see which shades clear the body-text contrast bar.

    What it checks & its limits: Accessible palette builder

    One brand color in, a light-to-dark ladder out, every step measured against white text and against dark text. The tick marks the 4.5 to 1 bar that ordinary body copy has to clear. A shade that misses it is not ruled out, because large text and interface parts need only 3 to 1, and the table says which shades those are.

    Open tool: Accessible palette builder

  • Checker

    Heading structure checker

    Read the h1 to h6 outline a page gives, in the order its source sets.

    What it checks & its limits: Heading structure checker

    Enter a page and read its heading outline the way the source order hands it over, with a missing h1, skipped levels and empty headings all flagged. It also tells you which of those a conformance claim actually turns on, which is fewer than most heading tools let on.

    Open tool: Heading structure checker

  • Checker

    Link text checker

    Read every link on a page stripped of the sentence around it.

    What it checks & its limits: Link text checker

    Screen reader users often pull up a list of a page's links and read it with none of the surrounding text, which turns twelve links all saying "read more" into twelve identical choices. This builds you that list. Read it as the stricter AAA rule, because at AA the card or paragraph around a link is allowed to supply its purpose.

    Open tool: Link text checker

  • Checker

    Alt text checker

    Paste a draft alt text and catch the failures a machine can actually catch.

    What it checks & its limits: Alt text checker

    Paste your alt text and it finds the mechanical failures first. Filenames read out letter by letter, the "image of" prefix heard twice, the single word that names a format instead of a picture. It reads only the text you paste and never your markup, so whether those words serve the image is still yours to judge.

    Open tool: Alt text checker

  • Helper

    Alt text decision helper

    Answer up to four questions to find which kind of alt text an image needs.

    What it checks & its limits: Alt text decision helper

    Decorative, functional, words inside a picture, or a chart. Up to four questions land you on the approach that fits, with the code to go with it, and with the cases where the right answer is an empty alt spelled out, because that answer comes up far more often than people expect.

    Open tool: Alt text decision helper

  • Checker

    PDF accessibility checker

    Drop in a PDF to find whether it is tagged or just a picture of a page.

    What it checks & its limits: PDF accessibility checker

    Drop in a PDF and find out in about ten seconds whether it carries a tag tree, whether it holds real text or a photograph of text, and whether the document title and language are set. It runs in your browser and the file is never uploaded anywhere.

    Open tool: PDF accessibility checker

  • Calculator

    ADA tax credit calculator

    Check the size test for the US Disabled Access Credit and what it would be worth.

    What it checks & its limits: ADA tax credit calculator

    The US Disabled Access Credit covers half of qualifying accessibility spending between $250 and $10,250, which caps the credit at $5,000 a year. This checks your business against the size test and does the arithmetic. Whether website work is qualifying spending is genuinely unsettled, so what comes back is an estimate rather than tax advice.

    Open tool: ADA tax credit calculator

  • Generator

    Statement generator

    Draft an accessibility statement, with the parts only you can answer left open.

    What it checks & its limits: Statement generator

    Fill in a short form and get a plain-English accessibility statement to copy or download, free. It is a starting draft rather than a finished document, and it says so, because the conformance status, the known limitations and the enforcement body all have to come from you.

    Open tool: Statement generator

  • Helper

    Audit scope builder

    Turn your views, journeys and states into an audit scope you can paste into a brief.

    What it checks & its limits: Audit scope builder

    A brief that asks for a page count tells a supplier nothing, which is why two quotes for one site come back ten times apart. Name your views, your journeys and the states they run in, and this writes the scope instead: a structured sample, a random set at a tenth of it on top, and the sentence saying a sample cannot answer for pages nobody opened.

    Open tool: Audit scope builder

  • Checker

    Audit readiness checker

    Ten questions about what you arrange before an audit can start cleanly.

    What it checks & its limits: Audit readiness checker

    Audits go slowly for boring reasons: nobody could reach the signed-in pages, the build changed under the tester, the findings landed the week before launch. Ten questions about the arrangements, including the access ones, which take longest and get left last. No credential fields anywhere, because whether a test account exists is a yes or no question.

    Open tool: Audit readiness checker

  • Checker

    Conformance claim checker

    Check whether a draft WCAG claim carries all five required components.

    What it checks & its limits: Conformance claim checker

    A WCAG conformance claim has five required components and most drafts carry three. This walks all five, then the scope conditions underneath them: whether part of a page was carved out, whether a checkout is only half covered, and what the two routes are for content you do not control. It checks the components, never whether the claim is true.

    Open tool: Conformance claim checker

  • Checker

    VPAT and ACR review checklist

    Nine buyer questions about a conformance report, and what to send back.

    What it checks & its limits: VPAT and ACR review checklist

    A supplier sent you a conformance report and almost every row says Supports. Nine questions about the document's own rules, answered with it open beside you: which edition and so which WCAG version, whether Not Evaluated appears where the template forbids it, and what is missing by design. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no score, because counting rows is not a comparison.

    Open tool: VPAT and ACR review checklist

These tools throw words like contrast ratio, accessible name and landmark at you without stopping to explain them. The A to Z glossary explains every one of them in plain English.

A tool settles 10 of the 356 techniques we graded

W3C documents 432 techniques and failures for meeting WCAG, and grades none of them for what a machine can do. We went through them one at a time, graded 356, and found 10 a scanner can decide on its own. That classification is ours rather than W3C's, which publishes no figure of this kind at all. Everything on this page aims at those and at narrowing down the rest. The full audit picks up where that stops, with an expert review and a real blind screen-reader user on your key journeys. $499, report in 5 business days.

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