A11yScan

A11yScan is a free website accessibility scanner. You paste a URL, it loads the real page, runs automated checks against it, and hands back a prioritized list of what's actually blocking real users, written in plain English. Under the hood it runs axe-core, the same accessibility engine that powers Lighthouse and Chrome DevTools, so the raw findings are the industry-standard ones. The difference is what happens after the scan. Instead of dumping rule IDs and a vague score on you, it translates each finding into what's wrong, why it matters to real users, and how to fix it, ranked by impact. The top fixes are ordered by how severely each issue affects users, so genuine blockers surface ahead of nitpicks. While it works, the scanner walks through reading your page, running the accessibility checks, and writing your report, and every issue in the finished list pairs a short why it matters explanation with a concrete how to fix it suggestion you can act on the same day.

The honesty is the pitch. Accessibility tooling has a credibility problem, with overlay widgets promising instant ADA compliance from a single script tag. The site points out that the FTC fined accessiBe a million dollars in 2025 for exactly that kind of claim. A11yScan takes the opposite posture. It says up front that automated scans catch an estimated 20 to 40 percent of real WCAG issues, that it is not a legal compliance certification, that no automated tool can guarantee ADA or WCAG conformance, and that manual testing by people, including people who use assistive technology, is still the only way to confirm real accessibility. It tells you what it found, what it missed, and what to do next. There's no overlay widget and no compliance badge it can't back up.

Using it is a three-step loop the site frames as scan, understand, fix. The scanner fetches the page you give it, runs the automated checks, and turns the raw technical output into specific, actionable fixes rather than a vague score or a widget that papers over the problem. The core scan requires no signup and no credit card, and the site says it only fetches the page you provide and that nothing from your scan is stored publicly unless you choose to share it. Each scan produces a report with a link you can copy and pass around, and after a scan you can leave an email address so A11yScan will re-scan the same page free in seven days and email you what changed, a small nudge to actually ship the fixes instead of filing the report away.

Two audiences are called out directly. Agencies and freelancers can run a quick pre-handoff scan on every client site, then share the public report link or embed a status badge. The badge deliberately says scanned, never certified, and it links to a public, always-current report for that URL, including any open issues rather than just a clean bill of health. There's an embed snippet for putting that badge on a site, and since the report reflects the latest scan, it stays current as issues get fixed. Site owners are the other group, and the framing there is blunt. ADA web lawsuits rose roughly 24 percent in 2025, and while a one-time scan won't keep anyone safe forever, it beats guessing and it costs nothing to run.

What makes A11yScan different from the crowd is exactly that refusal to oversell. The site describes itself as built for people who fix code, not script tags. Plenty of scanners exist, and plenty of overlay vendors will happily sell false confidence. This one stakes its position on stating its own limits clearly, then being genuinely useful within them. The paid side sells ongoing monitoring rather than a better version of the scan, so you're never wondering whether the free report was deliberately hobbled. If you want a ranked, readable list of real problems you can hand to a developer today, that's the job it does. If you want a certificate to wave at a lawyer, it will tell you honestly that no automated tool can give you one.

Access is freemium. The one-off scan is free with no account, and the free seven-day follow-up re-scan is included. Beyond that, paid monitoring covers the drift problem, because sites regress as new pages, new components, and new code ship. A Solo site plan at 19 dollars a month covers one site with up to five pages, and an Agency plan at 49 dollars a month covers up to ten sites. Both include weekly automatic re-scans and email alerts on new regressions, billed monthly through Stripe with the ability to cancel anytime, and the site publishes a refund policy alongside its terms and privacy pages, which is more paperwork transparency than most tools this small bother with.