What A11y Sweep can’t do

We’d rather you know this before you pay than after.

• It’s automated. We run the open-source axe-core engine (the same one inside Chrome and Lighthouse) on your pages in a real browser, then go further than most tools: we run every page again at phone width, press Tab through it the way a keyboard user would, read its heading and landmark structure the way a screen reader would, and list the checks axe couldn’t settle instead of throwing them away. Even so, the industry’s honest figure is that automated checks alone find roughly a third to a half of what a human auditor would; the extra passes close some of that gap, not all of it. A perfect score means the fixable, most-cited problems are clean — not that the site is accessible.
• It judges wording, not meaning. The full report has an AI model read your alt text and link/button labels and flag the useless ones (“image.jpg”, “click here”) with a rewrite. It reads the words only — it cannot see the image, so it can’t tell you a good-sounding description is describing the wrong thing. That wording (and nothing else — not your email, not the page) is sent to Anthropic’s API for the read.
• It doesn’t use the site. It loads each page once, as first rendered, and Tabs through what is there. Menus that open on click, modals, multi-step forms, and anything after a login are not tested.
• It crawls what it can find. The full report follows same-site links from your homepage, up to 50 pages. Pages that aren’t linked from anywhere we reach won’t be included. Sites that block bots, need JavaScript to render links, or take longer than 25 seconds per page may come back partial.
• It is not legal advice or a compliance certificate. It does not make a site compliant with the ADA, Section 508, the European Accessibility Act, or WCAG, and it doesn’t protect against demand letters. If you’ve received one, talk to a lawyer and a human auditor — our report is a useful starting list for that conversation, nothing more.
• Scores are ours, not WCAG’s. The score is the share of applicable automated checks that passed, held to 89 when a critical check fails. WCAG itself has no score. Don’t quote it as a conformance level.

What it is good for: finding the concrete, fixable things — missing labels, bad contrast, unlabeled buttons, broken heading structure — and explaining each one in words you can hand to whoever maintains the site.