Today we're publicly sharing what we've been building: Accessalyze, a free WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility scanner that doesn't just tell you what's broken — it writes the fix code for you.
If you've ever run an accessibility scan and stared at a report full of cryptic WCAG criterion numbers and vague remediation hints, Accessalyze is the tool we wished had existed when we started. Paste a URL, wait 30 seconds, and you get a complete accessibility audit with concrete, copy-paste-ready code fixes.
See how 321 websites scored →
View the 2026 ReportThe trigger was the DOJ's ADA Title II rule, which took effect in April 2026 and requires all state and local government websites to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA. That's tens of thousands of city, county, school district, and public agency websites — most with no dedicated accessibility team and limited technical resources.
We surveyed the existing landscape of accessibility tools and found two categories:
The gap was a tool that was both free to use and actually useful: one that identifies violations, explains them in plain English, shows you the offending code, and gives you a working fix.
AI made the third part possible. We use Claude to analyze each violation in context — seeing the actual element, its surrounding structure, and the ARIA role hierarchy — and generate a specific, implementation-ready code fix rather than a generic "add alt text" instruction.
The core scan flow is straightforward:
For a missing image alt attribute, most tools tell you: "Image elements must have alternate text." Accessalyze shows you:
/* Violation: WCAG 1.1.1 — Missing alt text */
/* Element: <img src="team-photo.jpg" class="hero-img"> */
/* Before */
<img src="team-photo.jpg" class="hero-img">
/* After */
<img src="team-photo.jpg" class="hero-img" alt="The Accessalyze team at our San Francisco office">
/* If decorative, use empty alt to hide from screen readers: */
<img src="team-photo.jpg" class="hero-img" alt="">For a color contrast failure, instead of "Text must have sufficient color contrast," you get:
/* Violation: WCAG 1.4.3 — Insufficient color contrast */
/* Element: .nav-link { color: #94a3b8 } on white background */
/* Current ratio: 2.85:1 (required: 4.5:1 for normal text) */
/* Fix — update your CSS */
.nav-link {
color: #64748b; /* ratio: 4.6:1 — passes AA */
}The difference in usefulness between "improve contrast" and "change #94a3b8 to #64748b" is the whole product.
Accessalyze runs on a Node.js/Express server with Puppeteer for headless browser rendering and axe-core for the accessibility engine. The AI layer uses the Anthropic Claude API to generate fix code from structured violation data. The entire stack is deployed on a single VPS — no cloud function sprawl, no microservices complexity. For the current scale, this is the right architecture.
Puppeteer + Chromium for full JavaScript execution — catches violations in React, Vue, and Angular SPAs that static HTML scanners miss.
axe-core 4.10 — covers 68 WCAG 2.1 AA rules. Same engine as Chrome DevTools Accessibility panel.
Claude analyzes each violation in its full DOM context and generates implementation-ready HTML, CSS, and ARIA code.
Pro tier generates downloadable PDF and HTML compliance reports suitable for auditor review or board presentation.
We made the free tier genuinely useful, not crippled. Three scans per day with no sign-up is enough for an individual developer to audit their project's key pages.
The Pro tier is designed for organizations that need to document compliance for regulators, auditors, or leadership — a downloadable report with your site's WCAG 2.1 AA status, violations by page and severity, and a crawl-wide score is something a department head can present to a board.
We timed our launch around the ADA Title II deadline in April 2026. Here's what we learned from that campaign:
The urgency was real but underappreciated. The ADA Title II deadline had been public for over a year, but most small government agencies had done nothing about it until the final weeks. When we reached out directly — with a concrete "here's what's broken on your site" — the response rate was much higher than generic compliance messaging.
Developers and IT teams are the real buyers, not compliance officers. The people who clicked through and converted were the ones responsible for actually fixing issues. They wanted the fix code, not just a report. This validated our AI fix code feature as the core differentiator.
Show, don't tell. Scanning a user's actual URL and showing them real violations on their real site — before asking them to sign up for anything — was far more effective than describing what the tool could do. The free-no-login first scan is a feature, not a compromise.
Automated scanners — including axe-core and by extension Accessalyze — catch approximately 30–40% of WCAG 2.1 AA violations. We say this prominently in our documentation and on the site because it's important context.
What automated scanning catches reliably:
What requires manual testing:
Automated scanning is the right place to start — it finds the most common violations quickly and for free. But it's not a substitute for manual testing on critical user journeys, and we don't pretend otherwise. For full WCAG conformance, you need both.
The immediate roadmap is focused on making the Pro tier more valuable for compliance workflows:
Longer term, we're interested in the overlap between accessibility and SEO — semantic HTML structure, heading hierarchy, and descriptive link text matter for both, and there's an opportunity to help developers understand why accessibility improvements have measurable SEO upside.
Paste any URL and get a full WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility report with AI-generated fix code in under 30 seconds.
Run a Free Accessibility Scan →3 free scans per day · No account required · Instant results
Yes. The free tier gives you 3 full WCAG 2.1 AA scans per day with no sign-up, no email required. The report includes all violations found, plain-English explanations, and AI-generated fix code. Pro ($49/mo) adds full site crawl, unlimited scans, PDF/HTML reports, and weekly monitoring.
Accessalyze uses axe-core, which is the most widely used automated accessibility engine — the same one built into Chrome DevTools, Microsoft Accessibility Insights, and Deque's enterprise platform. Automated scanning reliably catches ~30–40% of WCAG 2.1 AA violations. It won't catch everything (focus order, screen reader behavior, caption accuracy), but it will find your most common, highest-frequency issues quickly.
Yes, for the violations it addresses. The AI has access to the actual DOM element that failed, its surrounding context, and the WCAG criterion it violated. That's enough context to generate a working, specific fix in most cases. For highly custom components or unusual DOM structures, the fix code is a strong starting point that may need minor adjustment.
The Pro tier generates a downloadable PDF/HTML compliance report with your site's WCAG 2.1 AA scan results, violation summary, and site-wide score. This is useful documentation for regulators, auditors, or boards — but it reflects automated scan results only. For a full VPAT or formal accessibility conformance report, you'll need manual testing alongside automated results.
Pro tier site crawl starts from your seed URL, follows internal links up to 3 levels deep, and scans up to 50 pages. Each page gets a full axe-core scan. Results are aggregated into a site-wide report with a per-page violation table, a site-wide score, and the top 10 most common violations across all pages.
Related articles:
See real website accessibility scores: Browse 244+ free accessibility audits →
Try it yourself
Enter your website URL to get a free accessibility score.