Lightmorphic Access

What we check, and why

Twenty-five checks drawn from WCAG 2.2 AA - the standard nearly every accessibility law in the world points at. Here is each one, what it looks for, and who it shuts out when it fails.

What an automated check can and cannot tell you

Start here, because it changes how you should read your score.

Deque, who build the engine most of the industry uses, studied 300,000 real accessibility issues and found automated testing fully covers about 57% of them. The rest needs a person. A machine can prove an image has no description; it cannot tell you whether the description is any good. It can see that captions exist; it cannot tell you whether they match the audio. It can measure colour contrast; it cannot tell you whether your page makes sense read aloud from top to bottom.

So a clear result here means nothing obvious is broken. It is a good place to start from. It is not a certificate, and this tool will never tell you that you comply with a law, because no automated scan honestly can.

The four principles everything hangs off

WCAG groups every criterion under four ideas. They are worth knowing, because they are how auditors and lawyers talk about this.

The four WCAG principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust P Perceivable can they take it in O Operable can they drive it U Understandable does it behave R Robust can software read it

Fail the first and nothing after it matters: someone who cannot perceive your content has nothing to operate.

Accessibility — 21 checks, 165 points

Weighted by who gets shut out, not by how hard it is to fix. An unlabelled form field costs more than a missing table header because it stops someone buying from you.

Where the points sit

Bar chart of how many points each accessibility check is worth, from 15 down to 4 Do images describe themselves? 15 Is every form field labelled? 15 Does everything work without a mouse? 14 Is the text readable against its backg 12 Do the headings make a sensible outlin 10 Is the accessibility markup sound? 10 Can people enlarge the text? 8 Do video and audio have captions? 8 Can keyboard users see where they are? 8 Does link text say where it goes? 8 Can people skip to the content? 6 Does the page declare its language? 6 Does each page have its own title? 6 Are required fields explained? 6 Do tables have proper headers? 5 Is there a skip link? 5 Are element identifiers unique? 5 Does anything play sound by itself? 5 Can browsers fill in known details? 5 Are messages announced? 4 Are tap targets big enough? 4

The four in yellow are the ones that shut people out of doing something, rather than making it harder.

The laws, and who they apply to

Nine sets of rules across the places most people trade. Which apply to you depends on where you sell and who you are, not on where your server sits.

How the scoring works

Each check returns green, amber or red and earns all, some or almost none of its points. Your percentage is what you earned out of what was available. Findings are ordered worst first and heaviest first, so the top of your report is always the thing most worth doing.

Where something cannot be measured, we say so rather than guessing. If no colour pair is declared together in your stylesheets, we tell you it needs checking by hand instead of inventing a result.

Run a scan, or read our own accessibility statement - a tool that marks other people down for not having one ought to have its own.