The best free website accessibility checkers in 2026

Every tool here has a free tier that checks a live web page for accessibility problems, is maintained in 2026, and can be tried without a sales call. We compared them on the same points: how much is free, how many pages one check covers, whether you need an account, where the check runs (in your browser or on the vendor's servers), how much fix guidance you get, and what the tool does not check. Every price and limit comes from the vendor's own pages, as of 2026-10-27, and each one is listed under Sources.

The list is ordered by use case, not ranked. We did not run a side-by-side test for this page, so it makes no claim about which tool finds the most issues. One point applies to all seven: automated checkers find a subset of WCAG issues. Whether alt text is meaningful, whether the reading order makes sense, and whether a complex widget traps the keyboard still need a person. If you have seen a perfect automated score, read why a Lighthouse 100 isn't WCAG conformance.

• Check one page visually, no install: WAVE.
• Debug a page you are building, in DevTools: axe DevTools (free extension) or Accessibility Insights for Web.
• You are already in Chrome and want a number: Lighthouse. The score is not a compliance verdict.
• Work through guided manual tests: Accessibility Insights for Web.
• Scan 25 pages free, with an account: Pope Tech's free plan.
• Scan 5 pages with no signup, and also check security headers, cookie consent and deceptive design: Sitejar.
• A quick one-page snapshot from an enterprise vendor: Siteimprove's free checker.

WAVE by WebAIM: best free visual checker

In WebAIM's words, “WAVE is developed and made available as a free community service by WebAIM at Utah State University.” You enter a URL on the website, or open the extension for Chrome, Firefox or Edge, and WAVE draws icons for errors, alerts and structure directly onto the page, which makes it easy to follow for people who do not read code. The extension evaluates the page you are viewing in your own browser, so it can check intranet pages and pages you are signed in to.

Limits: it checks the page in front of you. For more than one page at a time, WAVE's own home page points to Pope Tech. There is no saved history in the free tool, and many results are alerts that need a person's judgement.

Full comparison: Sitejar vs WAVE

axe DevTools (free extension): best for developers

axe DevTools is Deque's browser extension, built on axe-core, the open-source rules engine that many other tools also use. It runs inside the browser's developer tools, so a developer can check the page they are working on, inspect the failing element and move on. Results are tied to specific elements and rule descriptions.

Limits: Deque's pricing page describes the free extension as basic automated testing “on a page-by-page basis”. Deque sells paid tiers beyond the free extension and does not publish the Pro price on its pricing page, so check Deque's site for what they add and cost. It checks accessibility only.

Google Lighthouse: already in your browser

Lighthouse is Google's open-source audit tool, published under the Apache-2.0 licence. It is built into Chrome DevTools, runs from the command line, and powers PageSpeed Insights, so there is nothing to install. Its accessibility category sits beside performance, SEO and best-practice audits, which makes it a convenient first look.

Limits: Google's documentation describes the accessibility score as “a weighted average of all accessibility audits”. Each audit is pass or fail with no partial credit, and manual checks do not affect the score. A score of 100 therefore means the automated audits passed on that page, not that the page conforms to WCAG. Each run covers one page. Read more: a Lighthouse 100 isn't WCAG conformance.

Accessibility Insights for Web: best for guided manual testing

Accessibility Insights for Web is an open-source extension from Microsoft, published under the MIT licence, for Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge. Microsoft's overview describes a quick automated pass (FastPass) and a structured assessment that guides you through manual tests alongside the automated ones. That makes it the closest thing on this list to a free manual-testing guide.

Limits: a full assessment takes time and some accessibility knowledge. It works on one page or flow at a time, it runs only in Chrome and Edge, and it checks accessibility only. Microsoft publishes no price for it.

Siteimprove Accessibility Checker: a free one-page snapshot

Siteimprove sells an enterprise digital governance platform, and offers a free accessibility checker on its website. Siteimprove describes it as “an immediate diagnosis of a single page's health”. For an organisation already evaluating enterprise platforms, it is a quick way to see how Siteimprove reports problems.

Limits: it checks a single page. The form invites you to add your email address to receive the results in your inbox as well as on screen. For pricing of the full platform, check Siteimprove's site.

Pope Tech free plan: most free pages

Pope Tech is a cloud accessibility platform, and it is the option WAVE's own home page points to for checking more than one page at a time. Its free plan covers 25 pages and is labelled “Free Forever”.

Limits: you need an account. It checks accessibility only. Paid plans are priced by page count: Team starts at $25 a month billed annually ($30 billed monthly) for 50 pages.

Plainly: Pope Tech's free plan covers more pages than Sitejar's free scan (5). If free page count is what matters most to you, start there.

Sitejar (our product): accessibility plus the rest of your compliance risk

Sitejar's free guest scan covers up to 5 pages, needs no signup and takes about 2 minutes. Each page is loaded in a real headless browser, so content added by JavaScript, menus and consent banners are checked as a visitor sees them. Accessibility is tested against WCAG 2.1 AA, and the same scan covers security, privacy, deceptive design, technical quality and SEO. Every finding carries a Confirmed, Likely or Needs review label, and SURE proposes source-level fixes. Nothing is applied to your site automatically, and there is no overlay (why we don't sell an overlay). Guest scan results are deleted after 24 hours.

Limits: the free scan covers fewer pages than Pope Tech's free plan. It is automated, not a manual audit, and it does not certify compliance. It reads public pages only.

Scan 5 pages free

Start with the question you are trying to answer.

“What is wrong with this one page?” Use WAVE if you want to see problems drawn on the page, or the axe DevTools extension if you live in developer tools. Both are free and fast, and both are better than a multi-page scanner for inspecting one page in detail while you fix it.

“Is anything wrong across my site?” You need more than one page per check. Pope Tech's free plan covers the most pages for free with an account. Sitejar covers 5 pages with no account, and also checks security headers, cookie consent and deceptive design in the same scan. Problems that live in a shared template (a header, a footer, a form) show up on every page that uses it, so a few representative pages tell you a lot.

“How do I test what automation misses?” Use Accessibility Insights for Web's guided assessment, then test with a keyboard and a screen reader yourself.

“Do I need a report for someone else?” Free tiers rarely produce one. Sitejar's paid plans add more pages per scan, more sites, PDF reports (white-label on Agency), an accessibility statement builder, an executive report and an ACR draft that follows the VPAT® 2.5Rev layout. See plans.

No automated tool, free or paid, can determine whether your site is legally compliant. The ADA has no certified status for websites, and WCAG conformance includes success criteria that need human judgement. A clean automated result means no machine-detectable failures were found on the pages checked. It does not mean those pages are accessible, and it says nothing about pages that were not checked.

The vendors' own numbers say the same. Deque, which makes axe, reports that in its own audit data automated testing found 57.38% of total issues, across first audits of over 13,000 pages or page states. That is a vendor's study, and it counts issues by volume, not WCAG success criteria. These are the checks that still need a person:

• Keyboard only: can you reach and operate every link, button, menu and form field without a mouse, in a sensible order, with a visible focus indicator?
• Screen reader: do headings, labels, buttons and live updates make sense when read aloud (NVDA with Firefox, or VoiceOver with Safari)?
• Alt text quality: a tool can see that alt text exists. Only a person can say whether it describes the image usefully.
• Captions and transcripts: are they present and accurate?
• Error messages: do form errors say what went wrong and how to fix it?
• Zoom and reflow: does the page still work at 400% zoom and at a 320 pixel wide viewport?

Overlay widgets are not a shortcut around this work: they change the page in the browser and leave the underlying code as it was (why we don't sell an overlay).

A practical sequence: run a free scan, fix the issues in your code, test the key journeys with a keyboard and a screen reader, publish an accessibility statement (our free accessibility statement generator helps), and scan again after each release.

For one page, WAVE and the axe DevTools extension are excellent and free, and Lighthouse is already in your browser. For guided manual testing, Accessibility Insights for Web is the most thorough free option. For the most free pages with an account, choose Pope Tech.

If you want several pages checked with no signup, and you also want to know about missing security headers, trackers that load before consent and deceptive design, start with a Sitejar scan. Whichever you pick, fix issues in your code and keep testing by hand.