Affilore
Affilore
Paste your HTML snippet below to instantly audit for WCAG compliance, ARIA tags, and structural ADA errors.
Enter your HTML code and run the audit to see your accessibility score and recommended fixes.
For most of the internet's history, accessibility was treated as an afterthought — a line item cut at the end of a sprint, a feature deferred indefinitely, a "nice to have" for companies with spare dev hours. That era is over.
In 2023 alone, over 4,600 federal ADA accessibility lawsuits were filed against businesses in the United States. Law firms have automated the process of scanning websites for WCAG violations and filing demand letters — often targeting small businesses and independent agencies who simply didn't know they were non-compliant. Settlement costs typically start at $25,000 and can climb well beyond six figures.
But the legal risk is only half the story. Google has been increasingly transparent about the relationship between accessibility and search performance. Semantic HTML, descriptive alt text, proper heading hierarchy, and fast load times — all core a11y requirements — are also core SEO signals. An accessible website isn't just ethically correct and legally defensible; it ranks better, converts better, and retains users longer.
The Affilore AI-Based Web Accessibility Tester gives developers and agency owners a fast, free, private way to catch critical WCAG violations before they reach production — or before a plaintiff's bot finds them first.
The tool was built for speed and simplicity. No account creation, no file uploads to external servers, no waiting for a cloud scan. Here's how it works:
Most accessibility failures aren't exotic or obscure. The vast majority of WCAG violations found in real-world audits come from a very short list of recurring mistakes. Here are the five that account for the bulk of complaints and lawsuits:
Every <img> element that conveys meaning must have a descriptive alt attribute. Screen readers announce images by reading the alt text aloud — without it, a visually impaired user hears "image" and nothing else. Decorative images should use alt="" (empty, not absent) to tell assistive technology to skip them entirely.
Wrong: <img src="hero.jpg">
Right: <img src="hero.jpg" alt="Founder presenting at a startup conference in Austin">
Using a wall of <div> and <span> elements where native HTML elements exist is one of the most pervasive accessibility failures. Native elements like <button>, <nav>, <main>, <article>, <header>, and <aside> carry implicit ARIA roles and keyboard accessibility out of the box. A <div> styled to look like a button does not.
<button> for interactive controls, not <div onclick="..."><nav> for navigation regions<main> for your primary content area — only once per page<h1> through <h6>) in logical hierarchical orderWCAG requires a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18pt or 14pt bold) against its background. Light grey text on a white background, or yellow text on a white button — common in modern "minimalist" design — frequently fails this threshold. Users with low vision or colour blindness rely on sufficient contrast to read content at all.
Icon buttons — a hamburger menu, a close icon, a search magnifier — are invisible to screen readers without an accessible label. An icon wrapped in a <button> with no text and no aria-label reads only as "button." The user has no idea what it does.
Wrong: <button><i class="fa fa-search"></i></button>
Right: <button aria-label="Search"><i class="fa fa-search"></i></button>
Every form input (<input>, <select>, <textarea>) must be programmatically associated with a label. Placeholder text is not a substitute for a label — it disappears as soon as the user starts typing, and it's frequently ignored by assistive technology. Use <label for="inputId"> paired with the input's id, or wrap the input inside the <label> element.
Wrong: <input type="email" placeholder="Your email">
Right: <label for="email">Email Address</label><input type="email" id="email">
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the internationally recognised standard for digital accessibility, published by the W3C. They are organised into success criteria grouped under four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Each criterion is assigned a conformance level:
For most developers and agencies: target AA conformance on all new builds and treat AAA features as progressive enhancements.
"Shift-left" is a software development principle: the earlier in the development lifecycle you test, the cheaper it is to fix what you find. This is nowhere more true than in accessibility.
The cost to fix an accessibility bug scales dramatically depending on when it's caught:
The Affilore AI Accessibility Tester is purpose-built for the leftmost shift possible — testing HTML fragments before they are even built into a live page. You catch missing labels, semantic errors, and contrast issues while you're still writing the code, not after a QA team or plaintiff's bot has found them in production.
"a11y" is a numeronym — a word abbreviated using numbers. It stands for accessibility: a + 11 letters + y. Numeronyms are common in the tech industry (i18n for internationalisation, l10n for localisation). You'll see a11y used throughout developer communities and tooling as shorthand for accessibility work.
Yes, in meaningful ways. Google's ranking algorithm does not audit for WCAG compliance directly, but many accessibility best practices are also core SEO best practices. Page structure with semantic HTML improves crawlability. Descriptive alt text feeds Google Images and improves image search ranking. Logical heading hierarchies improve content understanding. Good Core Web Vitals — themselves influenced by clean, efficient HTML — are a confirmed ranking factor. Accessible sites are, categorically, more indexable sites.
The Affilore AI Accessibility Tester analyses HTML code that you paste directly into the tool. It does not crawl a live URL. This is intentional — it enables private analysis of code before it is ever deployed, which is the core value of shift-left testing. For full-site crawl testing of a live URL, this tool works best as a complement to browser-level extensions like axe DevTools or Google Lighthouse.
WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023, is a backwards-compatible update to WCAG 2.1. It adds 9 new success criteria, primarily focused on users with cognitive disabilities and low vision, and removes one criterion from 2.1 (4.1.1 Parsing, which became redundant as browsers matured). The most practically significant new additions include Focus Appearance (AA) — which formalises requirements for visible focus indicators — and Accessible Authentication (AA, minimum), which restricts cognitive tests like CAPTCHAs in login flows. If you were compliant with 2.1, reviewing the 9 new 2.2 criteria is the only required update.
Absolutely. The tool output can be used as supporting documentation when delivering an accessibility report to a client. For formal, legally binding audits, you should supplement automated tool output with manual testing and testing by users with disabilities — no automated tool catches 100% of accessibility barriers. The industry benchmark is that automated tools reliably catch approximately 30%–40% of WCAG issues; the remainder require human judgement.
The tool handles standard HTML fragments and page sections without issue. For very large, JavaScript-heavy single-page application codebases, testing individual components or template files is more practical than pasting an entire rendered DOM. Component-level testing also produces more actionable results — you know exactly which component contains each violation rather than hunting through thousands of lines.
Your Code Has Violations Right Now. Find Them Before Someone Else Does.
Every week without an accessibility audit is a week of compounding legal exposure and SEO underperformance. Scroll back to the top, paste in your HTML snippet, and run your first audit right now. It takes 30 seconds. The violations it finds could save you tens of thousands of dollars.