AccessMate - Accessibility Scanner with AI Suggestions and Lightweight Toolbar. WCAG, ADA & EAA

Accessibility work usually costs you a loop. Copy a URL. Paste it into an off-site scanner. Wait. Hit the free-tier limit. Read a report that tells you what is broken but not what to type. Switch to your editor. Guess at the fix. Go back, paste the URL again, and start over — for every page, every time the site changes. AccessMate closes that loop inside WordPress. Scan from your dashboard, see every issue ranked by severity, copy an AI-suggested code fix straight into your editor, and re-scan in a click. No tab-switching, no re-pasting URLs, no per-scan credits. Why developers pick AccessMate

• The whole site, in one place — scan your pages from the Pages & Posts list and see them together: score, letter grade, issue count and last scan date per page, with the worst offenders ranked so you know where to start
• Fixes you can paste, not homework — most scanners hand you a rule name and a spec link. AccessMate shows the offending markup, the exact success criterion, and — with AI enabled — a corrected code snippet you copy into your editor
• Scan the page you are looking at — hit Scan Page in the admin bar on any front-end page and results slide in over the live site. No going back to the dashboard to check your work
• Catch regressions before your client does — accessibility is not a one-off project. Re-scan after a redesign, a new plugin or a content push and see immediately whether anything you shipped broke what was working
• A toolbar, not an overlay — visitor comfort controls without the price tag or the promises

A toolbar, not an overlay AccessMate's visitor toolbar does one honest thing: it lets visitors adjust how your site is displayed — larger text, higher contrast, a dyslexia-friendly font, reduced motion. It is 15KB, loads deferred, and renders in a Shadow DOM so it cannot touch your theme's styles. What it deliberately does not do is rewrite your markup, inject ARIA it cannot understand, or claim to make your site compliant. No front-end script can do that. Real accessibility comes from fixing the underlying code — which is exactly what the scanner half of AccessMate is built to help you do, quickly. Core features

• Accessibility scanner — powered by axe-core, scans your pages against your choice of WCAG standard, or several combined at once
• Score & letter grade — every scanned page gets a 0–100 score and an A/B/C/D/F grade, calculated from passed checks against failures weighted by Critical/Serious/Warning/Notice severity
• Site-wide scanning — AccessMate discovers the public URLs on your site and scans them individually, with per-page results, search, and post-type filtering
• Scan from the front end — a "Scan Page" button in the admin bar scans whatever page you are viewing and shows results in a slide-in panel, with filter tabs for Critical, Serious and Passed checks and a ruleset switcher for re-scanning
• Issues by page — stacked bar chart showing critical/serious/warning/notice counts per page
• Issue detail panel — shows the offending HTML, the WCAG success criterion with a link to the spec, the CSS selector, and the affected element count
• Passed checks — AccessMate records what passed, not just what failed, so you can show progress
• Accessibility statement generator — a five-step wizard that produces a published accessibility statement page for your site
• Visitor accessibility toolbar — floating widget with 10 user-controlled accessibility features, configurable colour, position and button size
• AI fix suggestions (requires API key) — explains what to change and generates a corrected code snippet
• AI explanations (requires API key) — plain-English summaries of an issue for non-technical site owners

WCAG standards & rulesets AccessMate scans with axe-core, the same open-source accessibility testing engine used by major browser DevTools. Pick any one of the following from the ruleset selector in the scanner or in Settings:

• WCAG 2.0 — A, AA, or AAA
• WCAG 2.1 — A, AA, or AAA
• WCAG 2.2 — AA
• Section 508
• Best Practice — common accessibility recommendations beyond the WCAG spec
• Combined presets — Best Practice + WCAG 2.0 AA, + WCAG 2.1 AA, or + WCAG 2.2 AA

Visitor accessibility toolbar features

• Font size
• High contrast
• Dyslexia font
• Grayscale
• Reading guide
• Pause animations
• Line height
• Large cursor
• Highlight links
• Screen mask

Each feature can be switched on or off in the Widget configurator, along with the accent colour, screen position and button size. The toolbar renders inside a Shadow DOM, so its styles cannot affect your theme, and visitor preferences are remembered in their browser's localStorage. AI providers supported

• Anthropic Claude (claude-haiku-4-5, claude-sonnet-4)
• OpenAI (gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4o)
• Google Gemini (gemini-1.5-flash, gemini-1.5-pro)
• Ollama (local, no key needed — llama3.2, mistral, phi3)

Privacy AccessMate makes no external requests unless you configure an AI provider and trigger an AI action. When an AI action is triggered, your WordPress server makes a direct request to your chosen provider using your key. No data passes through AccessMate servers. The API key is encrypted at rest using AES-256-CBC with your WordPress auth salt. The OpenDyslexic font used by the toolbar's dyslexia feature is bundled inside the plugin and served from your own site. No font CDN is contacted.

1.1.0

• Added selectable rulesets, including WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2, Section 508, and Best Practice, along with combined presets such as "Best Practice + WCAG AA" for scans.
• Replaced the previous fixed WCAG 2.1 AA-only scanning configuration with flexible ruleset selection.
• Added a "Serious" severity tier (alongside Critical/Warning/Notice) and moved to a weighted accessibility score.
• Added an accessibility statement generator.
• Implemented various user interface improvements.
• Minor code improvements and changes.

1.0.0

• Initial release
• WCAG 2.1 AA scanner with per-page scoring and letter grades
• React admin dashboard with severity breakdown and Issues by Page chart
• Per-page scanner with per-URL results and slide-in issue panel
• Front-end scan overlay launched from the admin bar
• AI provider integration (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama) — bring your own key
• Visitor accessibility toolbar with 10 features (Shadow DOM, localStorage)
• Widget configurator with colour, position, and feature toggles
• Full i18n support — all user-facing strings are translatable