Our free scanner now renders your page in a real browser

Most free accessibility checkers download your page's HTML and pattern-match it. That catches missing alt attributes and unlabeled form fields, but it is blind to anything the browser computes - and the single most common real-world failure, colour contrast, only exists after CSS is applied. A scanner that never renders your page cannot see the one problem your site most likely has.

What changed

The free scanner now loads your page in headless Chrome and runs axe-core against the live, rendered DOM - the same engine our paid Section 508 pipeline uses for verification. That means computed contrast, ARIA resolved the way a screen reader sees it, and content that only exists after JavaScript runs. Alongside it, a Lighthouse lab run measures real Core Web Vitals, so the score reflects the page a visitor actually gets.

What we deliberately kept

The static checks did not go away. A page that renders beautifully can still ship without a main landmark, with three h1s, or with link text that says "click here" - so the rendered results are merged over the static ones, and the score is never allowed to improve just because the browser pass saw less. A scan can get stricter, not softer.

The boring security part

Pointing a real browser at any URL a stranger types is a classic way to get burned: the browser does its own DNS, follows its own redirects, and fetches every subresource. So the browser runs in a quarantined network segment with no route to anything internal - enforced twice, once by network topology and once by firewall rules the deploy re-applies on every push. If that sounds paranoid, good. It should be.

Run it yourself with the free scanner - no account needed, and if you create one, the report follows you into your portal.