Real tools, what they actually catch, and honestly, what they miss.
Website accessibility lawsuits (ADA Title III in the US) are a real, growing risk for small businesses, not just large companies — and most people find out there's a problem only after getting a letter. The good news: checking your own site takes about five minutes with tools that are genuinely free, not trial-and-upsell.
Here's the part usually left out of "free tool" lists: automated scanners like the ones above — including the axe-core engine underneath most of them — catch roughly 30-50% of real WCAG issues, by axe-core's own documented coverage. Things they structurally can't detect: whether alt text is meaningfully descriptive vs. just present, whether a page makes logical sense navigated by keyboard only, whether a screen reader user could actually complete a checkout flow. Those need an actual human trying to use the site that way.
So: run one of the free tools above today — it's a genuinely useful first pass and costs nothing. Whether you need to go further depends on your real exposure (how much traffic, how regulated your industry, whether you've already been contacted).
If you want a written report instead of reading a tool's raw output yourself — prioritized by severity, in plain English, with links to exactly how to fix each thing — that's the Accessibility Audit service: $19, 24h turnaround, same axe-core engine, honest about what automated scanning does and doesn't cover.
See it in the shop →