How to check your website's accessibility for free

What automated checks can and can't find

Website accessibility means people with disabilities can use your site: people who are blind and use a screen reader (software that reads the page aloud), people who use a keyboard instead of a mouse, people who zoom in.

An automated checker is good at:

• Form boxes with no label.
• Links and buttons with no words, often an icon.
• Pictures with no alt text (the description a screen reader reads out).
• A missing page language or page title.
• Headings that skip a level.
• Zoom turned off on phones.

It can't tell you:

• Whether the alt text describes the right thing.
• Whether you can use the whole page with a keyboard.
• Whether captions match what's said in a video.
• Whether a PDF can be read aloud.
• Whether the page makes sense in the order a screen reader reads it.

The W3C, which writes the accessibility guidelines (WCAG), puts it plainly: tools can't decide whether a site is accessible, they can only help. The US Department of Justice says a clean report doesn't necessarily mean everything is accessible, and suggests pairing checkers with a check by hand.

Step 1: the automated part (5 minutes)

1. Accessibility Check: reads one page's code against 13 rules (labels, links and buttons with no words, "click here" links, page language and title, headings, tables, embedded frames, zoom, sound that plays by itself, Tab order) and says what to fix.
2. Full Check: adds pictures with no alt text, along with links and site health, in one report.
3. Color check: Accessibility Check reads code, not the drawn page, so it doesn't judge color contrast. Put your text and background colors into Color check instead.

Run them on your home page, your contact page and the page people use most. A finding on every page usually comes from the template, which your website company fixes once for all of them.

Step 2: by hand (about 20 minutes)

1. Put the mouse away. Click an empty part of the page, then press Tab to move from link to link and Shift+Tab to go back. Can you always see where you are? Can you reach and use the menu, every form and any pop-up, and press Enter to follow a link? (In Safari on a Mac, hold Option as you press Tab.)
2. Zoom to 200%. Press Ctrl and + (⌘ and + on a Mac) until the browser says 200%. Nothing should be cut off or overlap. Screen sizes has a 200% zoom view beside the normal one.
3. Listen for a minute. Every computer and phone has a free screen reader: Narrator on Windows (Windows+Ctrl+Enter, the same again to stop), VoiceOver on a Mac (⌘+F5), and one under Settings, Accessibility on phones. Does your home page make sense read aloud? What a screen reader hears is a gentle first try.
4. Read your alt text. Does each picture's description say what it shows, and what it's for? See Write good alt text.
5. Play a video with captions on. Are they there, and do they match what's said? See Captions for recorded meetings.
6. Open a PDF and try to select a sentence. If you can't, it's a scanned picture of a page, and a screen reader hears nothing. See Make a scanned PDF accessible.
7. Look for color alone. Anything shown only by color, such as "required fields are in red", needs words too.

The W3C's Easy Checks walks through more by-hand tests, with pictures.

What to do with what you find

• Write it down: the page, what's wrong, and what you did when it went wrong.
• Fix what stops people first: forms, links and buttons with no words, and PDFs people need, such as agendas and forms.
• Not sure what a finding means? Accessibility scanner findings explained covers the common ones, and WCAG explained the rules behind them.
• Say what you're doing: an accessibility statement tells visitors how to reach you if something doesn't work for them.
• Check again after any change to your template, and every few months.

When a checker gets it wrong

Every automated checker, ours included, gets things wrong now and then. Accessibility Check reads the code a page arrives with, so if a script adds words to a link or button after the page loads, we can report it as having no words when people hear it fine. A screen reader test settles it. If a finding looks wrong, tell us and we'll look into it.