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Websites are undoubtedly one of the main ways we access information, products, and services online. With this in mind, they must be accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. This is especially true as American and European regulators continue to apply pressure to businesses over accessibility legislation.
To help you keep your website accessible and compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards, we have reviewed the best website accessibility checkers. This guide highlights their key features, benefits, and which organizations they suit best.
A website accessibility checker is a software tool or browser extension that scans your website’s HTML, CSS, and page structure to identify barriers that may make it difficult for people with disabilities to access and use your content.
Most tools test your site against WCAG, which is organized into three levels: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. For most businesses and organizations, Level AA is the most practical benchmark because it considers accessibility requirements while remaining achievable for design and development teams.
Automated accessibility checkers scan your website’s code and compare it against WCAG success criteria. They analyze the page using automated algorithms similar to a search engine crawler or screen reader, looking for missing attributes, structural errors, and improper styling.
Once the scan is complete, the tool will usually categorize findings into confirmed errors, warnings, or potential issues and generate a report showing what needs fixing. This makes it much easier for teams to prioritize accessibility issues based on their severity.
One of the main reasons to use an accessibility checker is to mitigate legal and compliance risk. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires many businesses selling products or services in the EU to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. In the US, legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 is prevalent.
Beyond compliance, there are many more reasons why accessibility is important. For instance, it provides significant SEO benefits, as search engines reward websites that use clean HTML, descriptive links, clear headings, and meaningful image alt text. Using a checker tool to make changes also saves time for developers, as catching bugs during the design or staging phase prevents costly code rewrites after launch.
The best accessibility checker depends on your team’s technical skills and compliance requirements. Below are ten popular options, along with their key features and who they are best suited to.
Recite Me is an enterprise-grade platform designed to help organizations monitor and improve website accessibility. It can be used to run a sitewide accessibility scan of your entire digital landscape, including web pages, PDFs, and videos. AI-powered code suggestions and autofixes are immediately available, allowing your teams to address non-compliance issues immediately.
The tool has already seen several success stories, particularly for large-scale websites looking to achieve EAA and ADA compliance. What’s interesting about this tool is that you can also track your progress towards compliance, which can be downloaded as a report and shared with key stakeholders.
Axe DevTools is one of the most trusted and widely recognized accessibility testing solutions for development teams. Built on the open-source axe-core engine, it allows developers to catch and fix accessibility issues directly within their browser or code editor before code is ever committed. Deque rigorously tests its ruleset to ensure the tool delivers zero false positives for its automated checks, saving developers from chasing non-existent bugs.
BrowserStack Accessibility Testing incorporates automated accessibility checks alongside its wider browser and device testing platform. Instead of evaluating your code in a generic simulator, it runs tests across thousands of real mobile devices, operating systems, and browsers. This is important for verifying that complex JavaScript, custom dropdown menus, or highly responsive layouts don’t break accessibility rules on phones or browser versions.
Google Lighthouse is a free, open-source website auditing tool built into Google Chrome. With no setup required, it provides automated checks across several areas, including accessibility, performance, SEO, and best practices. The accessibility section in Google Lighthouse evaluates pages against common WCAG requirements and provides a simple score from 0 to 100 with explanations of which checks passed and failed on that specific page. And because it is built directly into Chrome, it is a convenient option for a quick accessibility overview.
The ARC Toolkit is a highly technical accessibility testing extension developed by TPGi, a specialist accessibility consultancy. The toolkit provides deeper technical analysis than many basic browser checkers, making it suitable for teams working on complicated websites and web applications. TPGi ARC Toolkit is also specifically designed to allow developers to investigate issues related to page structure, interactive components and accessibility technologies such as ARIA.
AccessibilityChecker.com is another automated accessibility checker tool designed to help you immediately identify noncompliance issues. When you use this tool to scan your website, you’ll get a full breakdown of the issues on your company website. It checks against all levels of WCAG 2.2, ensuring you stay compliant with legislation such as the EAA, ADA, Section 508, PSBAR, AODA, ACA, and many more.
This platform also provides a wealth of additional information, making it a go-to for any accessibility-related questions. You can find compliance guides, accessibility statement templates, color contrast tools, and more.
AChecks is an accessibility monitoring platform designed for organizations managing large websites or multiple digital properties. Rather than running one-off tests, AChecks crawls your entire web footprint on an automated schedule, so you can share ongoing compliance scores with leadership.
Accessibility Insights is a free, open-source tool created by Microsoft that uses both automation and human checking. Available for browsers and desktop software, its core feature is FastPass, a rapid process that pairs an automated scanner with a guided visual check for keyboard navigation. It also has a full “Assessment” guide that walks teams step-by-step through manual audits.
EqualWeb combines automated artificial intelligence scanning with hands-on human expert reviews to look for compliance risks. It tracks your site’s code against current WCAG criteria and displays all identified errors on a single, clean dashboard.
Accessibility Cloud is a tool built for modern software companies. It uses an API-first system, meaning it connects directly to the tools developers already use. Plus, it scans new updates automatically before they go live and drops an alert directly into your team’s chat apps, like Slack.
Automated website checkers are great tools as they can save you a lot of time by finding code mistakes and help you keep your legal risks low. That said, automated tools typically only identify around 30% to 40% of WCAG accessibility barriers. That’s because automated tools are great at checking basic accessibility issues, but they cannot understand context properly.
In practice, the best approach is to use automated tools for quick, regular checks to clear out the basic errors and then have real humans manually test your website’s most important pages. This ensures your website is accessible, compliant, and usable for all visitors.
Looking for a quick recap? Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions on this topic:
No, automated scanners are very good at detecting clear technical issues, but they cannot assess more subjective areas, such as text clarity or if image descriptions are meaningful in context. Full compliance requires both automated testing and manual review.
Scans should be run whenever changes are made to your website. For regularly updated sites, such as content-heavy websites or online stores, weekly or monthly automated scans are recommended.
No, most scanners run outside your live website or asynchronously, so they do not affect page load times for visitors.
Yes, many enterprise accessibility checkers can crawl an entire website rather than scanning a single page. This makes it much easier to identify recurring issues across hundreds or thousands of pages and monitor accessibility.
Most accessibility checkers can detect issues such as missing alternative text, insufficient color contrast, empty links or buttons, incorrect heading structure, missing form labels, ARIA errors, and other common WCAG violations. Some tools also flag potential issues that require manual review.
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