Is Your Web Content User-Friendly for Everyone?
As part of Avid Core’s efforts to stay current with the latest digital accessibility best practices, I recently participated in a 2025 Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) webinar, hosted by Katy Jones of Granicus, a civic engagement platform provider for the public sector. Highlighting automated accessibility scanners, the presentation explored different types of tools, their pros and cons, and the importance of supplementing automated results with manual reviews.
As a communications professional whose job often involves implementing digital accessibility protocols and as someone who personally believes in the importance of accessible digital content, I consider it important to not only keep abreast of what’s new but to learn firsthand from other professionals in a variety of fields to enrich my day-to-day practices.
As such, it was very interesting to learn about automated scanners from a more technical point of view. While accessibility plays a big part in the content I create, as far as scanners are concerned, my only experience has been with Adobe Acrobat’s built-in accessibility checker. This tool reviews PDF documents and provides the user with a list of potential accessibility issues. I never knew there were different kinds of scanners; some more helpful and reliable than others…
The following highlights provide a useful overview of automated accessibility scanners, including the three main kinds: code scrubbers, widgets, and AI (artificial intelligence). While the focus may be on the tool itself, these points can help anyone improve the accessibility of their digital creations.
1. Automated scanners are not a “one-size-fits-all” solution
Automated accessibility scanners can be a useful tool for identifying gaps in compliance for a variety of content, including government websites and PDF documents. However, it is important to understand what automated scanners can and can’t detect. Scanners, for example, can check for missing accessibility tags, but they may miss other issues, such as alternate text (alt text) that may be present, but is too long or inaccurate. (More on this in the next section.)
Additionally, automated testing only accounts for approximately 40% of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG); about 60% of the WCAG guidelines need to be assessed manually. To ensure optimal compliance with WCAG guidelines, it is imperative to manually review the results provided by an automated tool.
2. There are different types of automated testing
- Type 1: Code scrubbers
Testing tools like WAVE and Axe Devtools are code scrubbers; these browser extensions read the source code of a page. Their main objective is to identify structural issues, such as missing accessibility labels, alt text used for photos, charts, or other images and graphics that provide added context, color contrast issues, or broken segments of code.
It is important to remember that code scrubbers can provide a checklist of things that need to be reviewed manually; they can’t definitively detect all accessibility issues.
- Type 2: Widgets
Widgets are tools that can offer users different ways of interacting with online content, often appearing as floating buttons near the bottom of a page. Widgets can help users change text or cursor size and magnify images, among other functions. However useful they may at first seem, widgets often make the user experience more cumbersome by interfering with accessibility technology, such as screen and braille readers.
Additionally, overlay options like widgets rarely work on mobile devices. Perhaps most importantly, widgets can’t make up for the inherent accessibility issues in a website’s code.
- Type 3: Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI scanners can help users restructure some of their website’s coding, and chatbots can assist in identifying accessibility guidelines and clarifying complex information using plain language. However, questions submitted to an AI program must be specific; AI can only cover what automated resources can cover, so incorrect or misleading results can easily be supplied to the user.
How to curtail potential inaccuracies? Make your questions as specific as possible. This, of course, will involve some background research on the user’s part – but it will pay off with better information from the AI chatbot.
3. Choosing the right tool
Code scrubbers were identified as highly recommended tools. AI was also recommended, but as more of a supplemental option. In any case, both tools require manual review and a basic understanding of accessibility dos and don’ts. As you may have guessed, widgets and other overlay tools were not recommended.
When searching for an automated accessibility scanner, we were cautioned to avoid tools that advertise “guaranteed compliance.” A tool that makes lofty promises like that may soon become obsolete, anyway, since WCAG guidelines are updated regularly, and new tools are created to replace existing ones.
4. Remember!
More important than which code scrubbers or AI programs one decides to go with, the two biggest takeaways to remember are: 1) manual reviews must always accompany automated feedback, and 2) staying compliant is not an end goal, but a daily responsibility.
Learn more about how you can keep up with the latest web accessibility guidelines by visiting the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s official website. You can also explore the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to help make your digital creations more user-friendly for everyone.