Accessibility Checker – WCAG 2.1 AA, EAA & Section 508 Site Audit – QAProof

Find out where your site fails WCAG — before anyone else does. Install the plugin, click one button, and QAProof loads your home page in a real browser and checks it against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. You get a score and the issues it found straight away. No account, no API key, nothing to configure for that first check. It is an accessibility scanner, not an overlay or a toolbar: it changes nothing on your site and shows nothing to your visitors. It finds a11y defects and tells you where they are, so you or your developer can fix them properly — the approach the accessibility community asks for, and the one that stands up when someone checks your work against WCAG, EN 301 549, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) or Section 508. What it checks QAProof runs the checks that can be made automatically, and tells you exactly where each one failed:

• Colour contrast (color contrast) — text and UI borders measured against the 4.5:1 and 3:1 thresholds, with the computed colours it used.
• Images without alt text — and alt text that is a file name, a placeholder word, or far too long.
• Form fields without labels — including fields whose only label is a placeholder, which disappears as soon as someone types.
• Keyboard focus — controls with outline: none and no visible focus style, which strand keyboard users.
• Heading structure — skipped levels, empty headings, more than one H1.
• ARIA — invalid roles and roles missing the attributes they cannot work without.
• Landmarks — content sitting outside any navigable region.
• Touch targets — controls below the 24×24px minimum.
• Page language — a missing or malformed lang attribute, which decides how a screen reader pronounces your page.

Every finding names the WCAG success criterion it relates to, the exact element (CSS selector and a snippet of the source) and what was measured — the actual contrast ratio, the actual size — so you can check it yourself rather than take our word for it. An honest word about "compliance" Automated checks find a meaningful share of accessibility problems, and they find them in minutes. They cannot tell you that a site is compliant. No automated tool can judge whether your alt text is meaningful, whether your tab order makes sense, or whether a screen reader user can actually complete your checkout. Standards like EN 301 549, the European Accessibility Act, Section 508 and Italy's AgID guidelines all expect manual testing with a keyboard and a screen reader. Use this to find what can be found quickly, to measure whether you are getting better, and to hand a developer a precise list. Do not use it as a compliance certificate — and be sceptical of any tool that offers you one. Check the whole site, not one page Site Audit finds your pages from your sitemap and checks every one of them, then does the thing a page-by-page list cannot: it groups the findings. On a WordPress site most defects live in a template, so the same problem appears on every page that uses it. Instead of reporting it forty times, Site Audit says "this one fix covers 38 pages" — and sorts the list so the fix with the widest reach is at the top. Run it again after the work is done and you get the other half: what changed since last time. How many issues were resolved, which ones, on which pages, and anything new that appeared. That is the part you can show a client. Coverage is always stated plainly — how many pages were checked out of how many were found, and which ones could not be loaded. A page behind a bot wall or one that times out is reported as exactly that, and never counted as passing. How many pages one run checks depends on your plan: 5 on the free plan, 50 on Pro, 150 on Business. The report always says how many it found so you can see what was left out. When a run finishes, a copy of the report is emailed to the address on your account. Beyond accessibility The same plugin also covers the visual side of QA, if you need it: Design Fidelity Does the live site actually match the design? The situation: "I sent the mockup to the developer and the result looks nothing like it. I spend hours comparing elements by eye — and still miss things." What you get: Connect your Figma account and pick a design — QAProof compares it against your live page. Every layout shift, color mismatch, typography difference, and spacing issue is flagged with its exact location and a copy-paste CSS fix. Responsive Testing Does your site hold together on every screen size? The situation: "Everything looks fine on my phone. Then a client calls from their iPad and says half the page is broken." What you get: Your page is tested at five viewports — desktop, tablet (portrait and landscape) and mobile (portrait and landscape). The AI identifies overflow, broken stacks, illegible text, and layout failures across all five viewports — not just the device you happened to check. Visual Regression Monitoring Did the last update break something you haven't noticed yet? The situation: "After a plugin update, the header shifted and a button disappeared. We only found out a week later — when a client complained." What you get: Set a baseline screenshot of any page. QAProof re-checks it on your schedule (daily, weekly or monthly) and emails you when the score drops below your threshold. Catch broken deploys in hours, not weeks. Design Audit (Design Debt Score) How consistent is your design system — really? The situation: "Our site uses 47 shades of gray and 12 different font sizes. There's a design system, but nobody follows it. And we have no way to measure how bad it's gotten." What you get: QAProof reads your live design tokens directly from the DOM — colors, fonts, spacing, CSS variables — and grades your design system's internal consistency on a score from 0 to 100. 0 is ideal. See exactly where the drift started. Who uses QAProof? QAProof works equally well for non-technical site owners and experienced development teams.

• Agencies & studios — audit a client site in minutes instead of an afternoon, and hand over a PDF that names the WCAG criterion and the element for each finding.
• Public-sector sites — councils, schools and agencies working to EN 301 549, the European Accessibility Act or AgID: find what is findable automatically, then put your manual testing time where it counts.
• Freelancers — prove your work matches the design with objective data. A score is more convincing than "trust me."
• In-house teams — set up monitors on your key pages and get alerted the moment a deploy breaks something.
• WordPress site owners — no code, no complexity. Install the plugin and click one button.
• QA engineers — help identify, reproduce, and investigate issues quickly, making the development process faster and more reliable.
• Designers — see exactly where your design was implemented incorrectly, and hand developers the precise CSS they need to fix it.

Getting started Your first check needs nothing but the plugin:

• Install and activate QAProof.
• Open the QAProof menu and click Check my site.
• A real WCAG 2.1 AA check of your home page runs — usually 1–2 minutes — and you get a score and the issues found.

To go further, connect a free account (Settings → it takes a minute) and you can:

• audit any page, not just the home page, and pick WCAG Level A, AA or AAA;
• see every issue rather than the first few, each with its element and a recommendation;
• export a PDF or email the report;
• set a monitor that re-checks a page on a schedule and tells you when the score drops;
• run the visual tests below.

What you get in every report

• An overall quality score from 0 to 100 — clear, communicable, and objective.
• Category-by-category breakdown with visual charts.
• Every issue listed with its exact location on the page.
• Ready-to-paste CSS fix recommendations — not "something looks off" but "add margin-top: 16px to .header-nav".
• PDF reports — the findings, the elements and the measured values, ready to send to your client in one click.
• Email reports — send directly from the interface without downloading.
• WCAG level selector (A / AA / AAA) — adjust audit strictness to match your requirements.
• Saved designs — save a Figma design once, reuse it across all future tests.

Why choose QAProof over separate tools? The market has tools for design comparison. Separate tools for regression. Separate tools for accessibility. QAProof combines all five in one platform.

• WCAG 2.1 accessibility audit — Level A, AA, AAA
• A real result before you create an account
• Design vs. live page comparison
• Figma tool support
• Responsive testing across 5 viewports
• Visual regression monitoring
• Design Debt Score
• WordPress plugin with built-in admin UI
• Scheduled automatic monitoring
• PDF reports
• AI-generated CSS fix recommendations

Start for free today Install the plugin and click Check my site. You will know where your site stands before you have typed an email address.

1. Install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory (or upload the ZIP via Plugins → Add New → Upload).
2. Activate it — a QAProof menu appears in your admin sidebar.
3. Open QAProof and click Check my site. Your accessibility score and the issues found appear in a minute or two. No account needed for this.

To audit other pages, see every issue, export PDFs or set up monitoring:

1. Create a free account at qaproof.io/signup and copy your API key (API Keys page).
2. Paste it into QAProof → Settings and save.

1.0.45

• Site Audit now starts with the pages in your menu. When a site has more pages than your plan audits in one run, the pages were chosen by the shape of their addresses, which on WordPress's default permalinks came out as the first few posts in alphabetical order. The site's own navigation is read first now, so the audit covers the pages you consider your main ones. This runs on the QAProof service and reaches you with or without this update. A site you have audited before keeps its page list, so results stay comparable.
• When an audit stopped at your plan's limit, the report says so. It shows how many pages were found, how many were checked, and which plan covers more, with a link. It appears only when the limit was actually reached.
• A contrast ratio just under the requirement is no longer displayed as the requirement itself: 4.4957:1 was shown as "4.5:1 (needs 4.5:1)". It is shown as 4.49:1.

1.0.44

• Findings that are not failures are now labelled Observation. Some items in a report are deliberately left out of the counts and the score: either WCAG does not require them (heading order, landmarks, duplicate ids) or the checker could not confirm them (text over a gradient). They were labelled Unverified, which only described the second kind.
• Fewer false failures, and fewer missed ones. The checks run on the QAProof service, so these reach you with or without this update. A skip link written as a button, an inactive tab, a focusable carousel slide and an SVG hidden from screen readers are no longer reported as Level A failures. Target size (WCAG 2.2) now applies its inline and spacing exceptions. Contrast is measured on the colour the text is actually drawn in, and large text uses the WCAG thresholds of 18pt, or 14pt bold. Focusable elements hidden from screen readers with aria-hidden are now reported.
• Monitors no longer report a hover colour as a change. The capture left the pointer in the middle of the page, so whatever sat under it could be photographed in its hover state and compared with a baseline taken without it.
• A grouped Site Audit finding now counts each page once. Two findings on the same page were shown as two pages.

1.0.43

• Reports no longer name CSS classes your page does not have. To photograph a page in its final state the audit marks lazy-loaded images, animations and collapsed menus as loaded, and those marker classes were leaking into the selectors in your report — so a finding could point at img.img-fluid.lazyloaded, an element nowhere in your HTML. Runtime state such as the active carousel slide is left out too, which also stops one defect being listed several times depending on which slide happened to be showing.
• The package no longer carries a second copy of Chart.js. Chart.js v4 publishes only minified builds, so the 208 KB chart.umd.js shipped next to the file the plugin loads was a duplicate that was never loaded. THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt now says exactly what is bundled.

1.0.42

• Settings no longer says "This site is connected to your QAProof account" when the saved key is one the API rejects. It says a key is saved, and lets the account panel — which actually asks the API — report whether it works.

1.0.41

• Added the GPL-2.0 LICENSE file that THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt has been telling you to read. The build now refuses to package without it.
• Category names in the report now describe what is actually in them: an invalid ARIA role was filed under "Spacing & Layout" and a broken page language under "Text Readability".

1.0.40

• A mistyped API key now tells you so. Settings queued an error and never printed it, so pasting a malformed key returned a page that silently did nothing. Saving correctly says so now too.
• The PDF no longer carries a "verified" seal. Nothing verified it — there was no signature and nothing a recipient could check. It says what it is: an automated check. This plugin's own FAQ tells you to be sceptical of exactly that kind of mark, and it should hold itself to that.
• The readme now matches the code on what leaves your site (the plugin version and your WordPress and PHP versions travel in the User-Agent, as with any HTTP client), on Site Audit's per-plan page limit, and on the fact that a finished site audit emails you a copy.
• Fixed a finding that contradicted itself on a default WordPress theme, reporting content "outside any landmark region" while listing the landmarks it was inside.
• Errors from the analysis service are now written for you rather than for whoever operates it.

1.0.39

• Listing rewritten so the plugin can actually be found. The directory search could not match us on "EAA", "a11y" or "accessibility scanner" at all, because those words appeared nowhere in this file. They do now, and the tag that pointed at a four-plugin corner of the directory has been spent on ones people search.
• New FAQ: is this an overlay or a toolbar? It is not, and the difference matters enough to say so plainly.
• The accessibility report is now the first screenshot, instead of the dashboard.

1.0.38

• Download the site audit as a PDF. One file with the score, what changed since your last audit, the fixes that cover the most pages, and the per-page table — the report you send to a client. It states plainly how many pages were checked out of how many were found, and which could not be loaded.

1.0.37

• Site Audit: check the whole site, not one page. A new page finds your pages from your sitemap, checks every one against WCAG 2.1 AA, and groups the findings — so a defect in a template reads as "this one fix covers 38 pages" instead of being listed thirty-eight times.
• See what you fixed. Run it again and the report opens with what changed since last time: how many issues were resolved, which ones, on which pages, and anything new. The re-scan deliberately re-checks the same pages so the comparison is like for like.
• Coverage is stated plainly — how many pages were checked out of how many were found, and any page that could not be loaded is reported as that rather than counted as passing.
• Fixed: secondary text in the plugin's own admin screens did not meet the WCAG 1.4.3 AA contrast threshold (3.87:1 on light, 3.50:1 on dark). Both themes corrected.

1.0.36

• Listing name now says what else the plugin does: "Accessibility Checker & Visual QA".

1.0.35

• Connecting an account is one click. "Connect a QAProof account" opens qaproof.io, signs you in or creates a free account, and brings you back with the API key already saved. Pasting a key by hand still works.
• The first-run check lets you change the URL, so a local or staging install is no longer a dead end, and warns before running if the address cannot be reached from the internet.

1.0.34

• You can now see a real accessibility score without an account. The Dashboard runs a WCAG 2.1 AA check of your site on request — no API key, nothing to configure — and shows the score and the issues found. Connect a free account when you want the rest.
• The URL fields on the Tests and Accessibility pages are pre-filled with your own site address instead of being empty.
• Listing rewritten around what the plugin is mostly used for: accessibility.

1.0.33

• Plugin homepage link now points to qaproof.io.
• Settings: account panel says "1 monitor" (was "1 monitors").
• Listing: screenshot captions added; accessibility audit description clarified (automated WCAG 2.1 check, with a link to the free no-signup checker).

1.0.32

• Every accessibility and responsive finding now shows WHERE it is: the exact CSS selector (click to copy) and a snippet of the element's source, right on the finding card and in the PDF report.
• Tests page now discloses that AI element detection uses 1 AI generation before you run it.
• Plugin copy aligned with actual behaviour — descriptions, tooltips and button labels now say exactly what each action does.
• Compatibility confirmed with WordPress 7.1.
• Responsive Test is now the default test type — it needs only a URL, no design file.
• Quota and limit errors now show a working upgrade/verify link instead of a generic error.
• Added a "Create a free QAProof account" link to Settings for new installs.
• Dashboard "Upgrade Plan" now opens your QAProof billing page.

1.0.30

• Fidelity audit improvements and stability fixes.

1.0.29

• Report fidelity improvements across all five test types.