Free web accessibility checker (EAA and WCAG compliance)

# Free web accessibility checker (EAA and WCAG compliance) This web accessibility checker crawls a site and reviews it for adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Results can be accessed via Apify Console or downloaded in JSON, CSV, XML, or Excel formats. ## How to check web accessibility and WCAG compliance The web accessibility checker can help you make your site EAA compliant by crawling your site and showing any issues there may be. The Actor uses @axe/core, a widely trusted accessibility testing tool. After crawling the site, it will tell you if it found any issues, so you then know what to fix and where. 1. Create a free Apify account using your email 2. Open web accessibility checker 3. Add one or more URLs 4. Click the “Start” button and wait for the data to be extracted 5. Download your data in JSON, XML, CSV, Excel, or HTML ## Input To start checking for EAA compliance, add the URL for a website or a specific page and then click on Start. Note that there are a number of variables you can add to your run. For a full list, take a look at the Input tab. ## Output Once the Actor has finished its run, you can view your accessibility report in JSON. json { "url": "https://apify.com/", "passes": [ { "id": "aria-allowed-attr", "impact": null, "description": "Ensure an element's role supports its ARIA attributes", "help": "Elements must only use supported ARIA attributes" } ], "violations": [ { "id": "listitem", "impact": "serious", "description": "Ensure <li> elements are used semantically", "help": "<li> elements must be contained in a <ul> or <ol>", "nodes": [ { "target": [".list > li:nth-child(1)"], "summary": "Fix any of the following:\n List item does not have a <ul>, <ol> parent element" } ] } ] } ## What is web accessibility and the EAA? The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is EU regulation meant to ensure that people with disabilities can access goods and services. The digital aspect of the EAA mirrors the WCAG, guidelines set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the main international standards organization for the internet. The EAA lays out minimum requirements that sites doing business in the EU must conform to. These include: - Compatibility with assistive technologies such as screen readers or keyboard navigation - Improving website readability and usability through, for example, color contrast ### Why should you care about web accessibility? On June 28, 2025, compliance with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) became mandatory for businesses operating in the EU. Infractions may be fined between €5,000 and €20,000, depending on country and severity. You may also be fined up to €1,000 per day for unresolved infractions. Ensuring compliance is not just a legal obligation; it's a commitment to providing equitable access for all users, including those with disabilities. Not meeting these new standards could lead to reputational damage and possibly decreased custom from people who require an accessible digital experience. ## WCAG checklist WCAG works with a rating system which runs up to AAA level. To be compliant with EAA rules, every site needs to be at least have an AA rating. An overview of WCAG is here. Contrast (so how text appears on the screen) is one of the more important aspects and also easily fixed. - Briefly explain levels of conformance: A to AAA. - WCAG 2.2 checklist (most common ones) - Contrast seems to be a huge one - Link to full checklist somewhere (because it’s too large) ## Frequently asked questions ### Does the checker also check WCAG contrast? Yes, the web accessibility checker reviews whether your site complies with WCAG contrast rules. ### Is adherence to the EAA mandatory? Yes, adherence to the EAA is mandatory for any company doing business in the EU. ### Who needs to comply with the EAA? Any company that does business in the EU needs to comply with EAA regulations. ### How much will a web accessibility checker cost me? The web accessibility checker is free to use, but you do pay for platform usage. For details on how this works, check out our pricing page. ### Can I use integrations with web accessibility checker? You can integrate web accessibility checker with almost any cloud service or web app. We offer integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Sheets, Google Drive, and plenty more. Alternatively, you could us webhooks to carry out an action whenever an event occurs, such as getting a notification whenever web accessibility checker successfully finishes a run. ### Can I use web accessibility checker with the Apify API? The Apify API gives you programmatic access to the Apify platform. The API is organized around RESTful HTTP endpoints that enable you to manage, schedule, and run Apify Actors. The API also lets you access any datasets, monitor actor performance, fetch results, create and update versions, and more. To access the API using Node.js, use the apify-client NPM package. To access the API using Python, use the apify-client PyPI package. Click on the API tab for code examples, or check out the Apify API reference docs for all the details. ### Can I use web accessibility checker through an MCP Server? With Apify API, you can use almost any Actor in conjunction with an MCP server. You can connect to the MCP server using clients like ClaudeDesktop and LibreChat, or even build your own. Read all about how you can set up Apify Actors with MCP. For web accessibility checker, go to the MCP tab and then go through the following steps: 1. Start a Server-Sent Events (SSE) session to receive a sessionId 2. Send API messages using that sessionId to trigger the scraper 3. The message starts the web accessibility checker with the provided input 4. The response should be: Accepted ### Is it legal to scrape sites? Since you are not scraping any personal data, using the web accessibility checker is legal. For more details, read our blog post on the legality of web scraping. ### Your feedback We’re always working on improving the performance of our Actors. If you have any technical feedback about the web accessibility checker or have found a bug, please create an issue in the Issues tab.