accessibility glossary

Accessibility Scanner

An accessibility scanner is a specific automated tool, such as axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse, or a full-site crawler, that checks a page's underlying code against a rule set derived from WCAG and reports what it finds.

Different scanners vary in coverage and false-positive rates; axe-core (which powers many browser extensions and full-site crawling tools) is widely regarded as one of the more accurate and is used inside several major browsers’ own developer tools. Full-site crawling scanners can check thousands of pages automatically, which is useful for large sites, but every scanner flags only rule-detectable issues and can both miss real problems and occasionally flag non-issues that need a human to verify.

A scanner report is a useful starting point for prioritizing manual testing, not a finished accessibility audit on its own.

Need help with Accessibility Audit Services? See how halfAccessible can help.

Accessibility Audit Services