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Free accessibility tools

No signup, no trial that expires. Each one checks a narrow thing well and tells you honestly what it can't see. Most of them never send what you give them anywhere: they run entirely in your browser. Below them, four tools we don't own but genuinely rate — use whichever gets the job done.

  • Alt text checker Our differentiator

    Downloads the actual image file and uses a vision model to check the alt text is true of the picture, not just present. Limited to the first 6 described images per page, and it only sees what your server sends — images added by JavaScript after load are invisible to it.

  • Alt text generator

    Writes a draft description for an image you upload or link to, so you're editing rather than starting blank. It doesn't know your page's context — what the image is doing on that particular page — so treat every draft as a starting point, not a final answer.

  • Accessibility bookmarklet Runs on any live page

    Drag it to your bookmarks bar, then click it on any page — including a staging site, localhost or a page behind a login. It checks alt text, headings, link and button names, form labels and the contrast of the text actually rendered on screen. It's a quick automated pass: it can't judge whether wording makes sense, and a few sites' security settings block bookmarklets.

  • Contrast checker

    Checks a text and background colour pair against every WCAG contrast threshold, including see-through text and the 3:1 that buttons and icons need. Pick colours off the screen with the eyedropper (desktop Chrome, Edge and Opera), get the nearest colour that passes, and share the result as a link. It measures the pair you give it; for colours on a real page, use the bookmarklet.

  • Image contrast checker

    Draw a box over text on a photo, screenshot or gradient and get the worst-case contrast across everything behind it, with a map of where it fails — not one sampled pixel. The image never leaves your browser. The text colour is detected automatically but is an estimate, so for a result close to the line, type the real colour in.

  • PDF accessibility checker Never uploaded

    Checks the structure a screen reader depends on — tags, language, title, alt text on figures, headings, tables, bookmarks, form fields and security settings — inside your browser. It's a structural check, not a PDF/UA test: it can't tell whether alt text is accurate or the reading order is right. For a full check, PAC (Windows only) and veraPDF are free.

  • Heading checker

    Pulls the heading structure from a page and flags a missing h1 or skipped levels, like an h2 followed straight by an h4. It checks the outline, not whether each heading's wording actually makes sense out of context. To see the outline of a live page instead, the bookmarklet does this too.

  • Link text checker

    Finds links with no accessible name, or ones that just say "click here" or "read more" and give a screen reader user nothing to go on. It flags the wording pattern; it can't judge whether a specific link text makes sense in context, only whether it's one of the well-known bad ones.

  • Accessibility statement generator

    Produces a plain-English draft statement from a short form, covering what you've done and what's outstanding. It generates wording, not a compliance guarantee — you still need to check the claims in it are true before you publish it, and it isn't legal advice.

Free tools we don't own, and rate anyway

Some jobs are already done well by other free tools. Where that's true we'd rather point you there than pretend we do it too.

WAVE

WebAIM's browser-based scanner overlays icons directly on your live, rendered page, so you see exactly where each issue sits in context. Best first stop for visually understanding a page's problems, not just reading a list of them.

axe DevTools

Deque's browser extension runs axe-core, the open-source engine that underlies a large share of commercial scanners. Strong for developers auditing while they build, inside the same browser tab as the code.

Silktide toolbar

A free browser toolbar with 200+ checks, plus a screen reader simulator and disability simulations most free tools skip entirely. Worth installing just for the simulators, which make abstract issues concrete.

W3C accessibility statement generator

The standards body's own wizard for drafting a statement, grounded directly in WCAG language. If you want the generator closest to the source of the standard itself, this is it.

Want all 16 checks run together?

The free scan runs 16 rule-based checks across up to three pages in one go, instead of one tool at a time.

Scan my site — free