Accessibility is one of those things that feels optional right up until it isn't. Around one in six people worldwide lives with some form of disability, and if your signup form, pricing table or checkout doesn't work with a keyboard or a screen reader, those people simply leave. No error message, no feedback, just a closed door.
The rules have tightened too. The European Accessibility Act now applies to many digital products and services sold into the EU, and US accessibility lawsuits keep arriving in their thousands every year. For a founder, that's a legal risk and a growth problem wearing the same coat.
Here's the good news: you don't need an accessibility consultancy on retainer in week one. A handful of tools will surface the obvious problems — missing alt text, low contrast, unlabelled buttons, broken focus order — in an afternoon. Just hold one fact in your head before you start.
Automated scanners catch roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues at best. These tools are a starting point, not a certificate.
1. axe DevTools — the developer's default
axe DevTools is a browser extension built by Deque Systems, the company behind axe-core, the open-source engine that quietly powers a large share of accessibility checkers on the market. It scans the page you're looking at and returns a clean list of WCAG violations, each one pointing at the exact element, the rule it broke and how to fix it.
It's designed for people who ship code — developers, QA testers and technical founders. The free extension covers a lot of ground on its own. Paid tiers add automated testing inside your CI pipeline, so an inaccessible pull request can fail the build instead of reaching production.
It's free to start at deque.com/axe/devtools, with paid plans for teams that want continuous testing and reporting.
Why it made the list: it's the closest thing the industry has to a standard, and it explains problems in the language your developers already speak.
2. WAVE — the clearest way to see what's wrong
WAVE, from the team at WebAIM, is the tool most people recommend to a beginner. You paste in a URL or open the browser extension, and it overlays coloured icons directly onto your page: red for errors, yellow for warnings, green for things that are already fine.
That visual approach is the entire point. Instead of handing you a list of rule IDs, it shows the problem sitting on the actual element. It's widely used in education and by marketing teams who need a fast sanity check before a campaign or a landing page goes live.
wave.webaim.org is free to use with no account required, which makes it the easiest place to start.
Why it made the list: it's the fastest way for a non-technical founder to understand what an accessibility problem actually looks like.
3. Stark — accessibility for design and product teams
Stark is a suite of plugins that lives inside Figma, Sketch and your browser. It checks colour contrast, simulates different types of colour blindness, and audits work in progress rather than waiting for a finished build.
That timing is what makes it useful. Fixing contrast in a Figma frame takes seconds. Fixing it across forty components after launch takes a sprint, a review cycle and a lot of goodwill. It suits designers, design-led startups and anyone whose workflow starts in a design file.
getstark.co offers a free tier, with paid plans for teams that need unlimited projects and shared reporting.
Why it made the list: it pushes accessibility earlier in the process, which is the only point where it's ever cheap.
4. Pa11y — free, scriptable, no browser required
Pa11y is open source and command-line driven. You point it at a URL, it runs the accessibility rules and hands back a report you can pipe into your own scripts. Pa11y CI runs it against a list of pages, so every deploy gets checked whether anyone remembers or not.
It isn't pretty. There's no polished dashboard, no account manager and nobody to call when it breaks. What you get in exchange is unlimited scans at zero cost, which matters a lot when you're pre-revenue and your documentation site has two hundred pages.
pa11y.org is free and open source, and the code is available for self-hosting.
Why it made the list: it's the only tool here with no pricing page at all — and it's genuinely good.
5. Siteimprove — monitoring at scale
Siteimprove is an enterprise platform that crawls your whole site on a schedule, scores it against WCAG 2.2, and tracks whether things are getting better or worse over time. It covers content, design and code, and it can tell you which team owns each problem.
This is for companies with hundreds or thousands of pages, several subdomains and an actual compliance obligation — public sector suppliers, healthcare, finance, or any SaaS selling into those markets. It's also the kind of tool that procurement teams tend to recognise, which shortens some conversations.
Pricing at siteimprove.com is quoted rather than published, so expect a sales conversation before you see numbers.
Why it made the list: it's built for the reality that accessibility is never finished — it's something you maintain.
6. Level Access — when you need an audit, not a linter
Level Access pairs automated scanning with human audits and formal documentation. If a client, an investor's diligence team or a regulator asks for evidence that your product meets WCAG 2.2 AA, this is the category of provider that produces it.
More importantly, it covers the parts no scanner can reach: keyboard-only workflows, screen reader announcements, and whether your genuinely complex components — date pickers, modals, drag-and-drop, data tables — are usable by someone who isn't using a mouse. That's where most real-world barriers actually live.
levelaccess.com bundles monitoring, audits and training, aimed mainly at organisations in regulated industries.
Why it made the list: it names the thing every other vendor skips past — that most accessibility problems need a human to find them.
7. UserWay — overlays, and what they can and can't do
UserWay installs a small widget on your site that offers visitors a menu of adjustments: larger text, high contrast, dyslexia-friendly fonts, a reading guide. For people who need those changes, and for sites whose underlying code can't be touched quickly, it can genuinely help someone get through a page.
What it cannot do is make you compliant. This is the most important paragraph in this article. Overlay widgets sit on top of the page, but screen readers read the underlying HTML. If your form fields aren't labelled or your modal traps keyboard focus, the widget doesn't change any of that.
The evidence is uncomfortable. UsableNet's lawsuit tracking has found that a growing share of US accessibility lawsuits — around 28% by its 2025 count — were filed against sites that already had an overlay installed. And in 2025 the FTC fined accessiBe, one of the largest overlay vendors, $1 million over claims that its widget could make any website WCAG compliant.
userway.org offers a free tier and paid plans, and positions the widget as part of a wider accessibility effort rather than the whole of it.
Why it made the list: as an extra usability layer for your visitors, yes. As your compliance strategy, no. Treat the widget as paint, not plumbing.
How to Choose the Right Accessibility Tool
Start with what you can actually act on this week. If you have no accessibility process at all, install axe DevTools and run WAVE across your five most important pages today — signup, login, pricing, checkout and your main dashboard. That one hour will tell you whether you have ten problems or a thousand, and which direction you're heading.
Then match the tool to your stage. Pre-product or design-led: Stark. Small team shipping weekly: axe DevTools plus Pa11y wired into your deploy pipeline. Multiple sites, or a real compliance obligation: Siteimprove or Level Access. And if someone tries to sell you a widget as a certificate of compliance, ask them what percentage of WCAG issues their product can detect. If the answer is anywhere near 100%, end the call.
Budget honestly. The free tools will get you a good part of the way, but at some point a person who uses assistive technology needs to try your product, and that costs money. Plan for a genuine audit before you sell into the public sector, healthcare or the EU — not after a complaint lands in your inbox.
The Honest Takeaway
Every tool on this list is a detector, not a fixer. None of them will make your website accessible — they will show you where it isn't. The actual work, which is writing real alt text, labelling form fields, keeping focus states visible and writing in plain language, is still human work.
That's better news for a founder than it sounds. Accessibility fixes tend to help everyone: stronger contrast, clearer labels, faster keyboard navigation and simpler copy lift conversion for all your users, not just the ones using assistive technology. It's one of the few compliance projects that quietly pays you back.
So pick one free tool, run it this week, fix the top ten issues it finds, and put a single automated check into your deploy pipeline. That's a better starting point than plenty of companies three times your size have managed.
FAQ
Does using one of these tools make my website WCAG compliant?
No. Automated tools detect somewhere between 30% and 40% of WCAG issues, which by definition means most problems slip past them. Compliance also requires manual testing with a keyboard and a screen reader, plus an honest review of your content. Think of tooling as coverage, not certification.
Do I legally need to be accessible?
It depends where you sell. The European Accessibility Act applies to many digital products and services sold into the EU, US federal and state rules apply in a patchwork of ways, and accessibility lawsuits continue to run in the thousands each year. If you sell to businesses or public bodies, accessibility requirements often turn up inside the contract itself. Treat it as a market-entry question, not just an ethics one.
What should I fix first?
Start with anything that blocks someone completely: keyboard focus, form labels, button names and colour contrast on body text. A screen reader user who hits an unlabelled button or a form they can't submit has no workaround available. Cosmetic problems can wait in line; blockers can't.