An accessible website starts here.

Inaccessible websites create barriers for all your website visitors, not just people with disabilities. But before you can begin fixing accessibility problems, you need to know what the problems are and where they are. Using an automated website accessibility checker is an efficient way to check a website’s accessibility status and begin your journey towards accessibility compliance.

Your visitors rely on the usability of your website to engage with your brand. In the EU, about 87 million people have some form of disability, and in the US, that figure is over 70 million. Worldwide, the figure is 1.4 billion. Poorly designed, inaccessible pages make it difficult for individuals in these groups to use your website.

Simply put, if your website is not accessible, you’re automatically excluding a significant percentage of the global population. That exclusion not only threatens disabled people's rights but can also have severe consequences for your organization.

The internet features a wide range of testing tools and software programs for website accessibility evaluation. While some companies are reluctant to invest in a dedicated web accessibility tool, the fact is that creating and maintaining accessible web content is too large and difficult a task to be done without automated accessibility testing.

Fortunately, accessibility tools like the Siteimprove website Accessibility Checker surface WCAG and EAA violations could hurt your site experience and brand reputation. Manually auditing hundreds or even thousands of pages across your website for accessibility issues takes time, resources, and expertise. Thankfully, website accessibility checkers take care of much of the heavy lifting: You can check your website’s accessibility status instantly and confidently prioritize pages that need attention.

That doesn't mean that manual accessibility testing is a bad idea; rather, manual testing is an integral part of accessibility testing as not everything can be automated. Automation is a great, cost-effective (arguably the only financially viable way) to cover large amounts of content quickly, whereas manual testing is great for a thorough investigation into a smaller amount of content.

The free Accessibility Checker scans a single page of your site, shows you what’s flawed on that page, and gives you a sense of what issues might be lurking elsewhere on your site.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to perform a website accessibility check:

• Enter the URL for the specific page of the website you want to check into the checker form.
• Add your email to get your website accessibility results on screen and in your inbox within minutes. You can then share your accessibility checker report with your wider team.
• Check your unique accessibility score. This score reflects the accessibility compliance of that particular page and helps you get an idea of how accessible your website is.
• Review the page’s accessibility issues and errors in detail.

Armed with these insights from a single page, you’ll be in a good position to start your journey towards accessibility compliance. Use your personalized accessibility score and the list of confirmed accessibility issues as a first step to get your team on board with making your website digitally inclusive or go ahead and schedule a personalized demo to see how a more comprehensive accessibility audit will surface issues across your site. With a demo, you can see exactly how our tools can help remediate detected errors and monitor your site for accessibility compliance on an ongoing basis.

No. While there are many advantages to running regularly scheduled, automated accessibility tests, that doesn’t mean you shouldn't do manual testing. There are a number of areas where a human can determine accessibility issues that an automated tool may not recognize.

For example, manual accessibility testing is preferable to ensure that all facets of a page can be accessed with keyboard-only navigation and to probe for issues with screen reader compatibility.

Note: Beware accessibility overlays, which are automated software solutions that claim to identify and remediate web accessibility issues. They usually come in the form of a toolbar, plugin, app, or widget, and typically make web experiences worse, not better, for users with disabilities because they don’t make changes to a website's source code.

Testing website accessibility regularly and thoroughly is a must in today’s online environment, particularly as accessibility regulations such as EAA go into effect, WCAG continues to evolve, and the number of seniors who rely on the internet grows.

Whether your organization is new to the world of accessible content or looking to improve on its current approach, a well-considered combination of manual and automated accessibility testing will go a long way toward keeping your website usable for everyone who visits it.

Siteimprove's Accessibility Checker is a great free tool for getting a sense of your site's level of compliance, but it checks only one page. To cover your entire site, you need a robust tool like Siteimprove Accessibility to do in-depth testing, remediation, and ongoing monitoring over the long term. And, as noted above, manual testing is also critical.

Accessibility compliance is important for any business, but particularly for large, complex websites and businesses, including enterprises with multiple websites.

Benefits of an automated accessibility compliance include:

• Automated crawling of your entire website for regular accessibility health checks.
• Guidance for managing accessibility issues across all your web pages, divided into different levels of criticality, including WCAG 2.1 levels A, AA, and AAA.
• Guidance for meeting the requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA).
• Checking PDF documents for accessibility errors.
• A multi-user login that coordinates accessibility efforts across your whole team.
• Assigning accessibility tasks to different team members in the platform itself.
• Monitoring your progress towards accessibility compliance over time.
• Creating your own custom accessibility policies.

When using the free Accessibility Checker, it's important to select a page that represents the typical user experience on your website. Here are some tips to get a basic, high-level check that can give you insights into how compliant the rest of your site is:

• Choose a page with diverse content: Include text, images, videos, and interactive elements to ensure a comprehensive review.
• Avoid pages with dynamic content: Pages that change frequently or rely heavily on JavaScript may not be fully analyzed.
• Select a high-traffic page: Pages that receive a lot of visitors are ideal as they impact the most users.
• Ensure the page is publicly accessible: Private or password-protected pages cannot be reviewed.