The free tools that find most of it

Start with a page scanner

Browser extensions that scan the page you are looking at are the fastest first step. They report missing labels, contrast failures, heading problems and invalid attributes in seconds.

Run one on your homepage, your contact page and one deep page. Those three usually represent every template you have.

Read the findings rather than counting them. A single unlabeled field on the contact form matters more than a dozen notices on a decorative section.

Run it on three pages rather than one: the homepage, a contact page and a deep content page. Between them they usually exercise every template a site has.

The screen reader you already own

Windows and macOS both include one at no cost, and both phones have one built in. This is the most useful tool there is. Almost nobody uses it.

You do not need to become proficient. Turn it on, close your eyes, and try to find your own phone number or complete your own form.

Five minutes will teach you more about your site than any report. It is uncomfortable the first time and it stops being so quickly.

Turn the speech rate down first. The default on most systems is faster than a newcomer can follow, and fighting the rate is what makes people give up in the first minute.

The tab key

No install, no account. Press tab from the top of a page and watch the highlight move.

You are checking three things: that you can reach everything, that you can always see where you are, and that the order is sensible.

This finds hover only menus, invisible focus styling and popups you cannot escape, which together account for a large share of real world complaints.

Zoom and reflow

Enlarge the text in your browser substantially and look at what happens. Text should get bigger and the layout should adapt.

What you are looking for is content that overlaps, gets cut off, or forces the page to scroll sideways. Sideways scrolling at high zoom is a common and serious failure.

Do the same on a phone in portrait. That combination catches most layout problems that affect readers with low vision.

Color and contrast checking

Extensions and design tools will read a pair of colors and tell you whether they pass. Use one while choosing a palette rather than after building the site.

Also view a page in grayscale, which your operating system can do. Anything that becomes ambiguous was relying on color alone to carry meaning.

Do both themes if you offer a dark mode, since the second palette is usually the untested one.

What paid platforms add

Scale and record keeping. Scanning hundreds of pages on a schedule, tracking issues over time, producing reports for somebody who needs them.

That is valuable for a large site or a team with an obligation to demonstrate progress. It is rarely necessary for a site of a few dozen pages.

They do not find a different class of problem. The judgment gap stays the same whatever you spend.

They also add scheduling and history, which matters if somebody has to demonstrate progress to a buyer or a board. For a site of a few hundred pages, the free tools find the same faults.

A sensible order to work in

Scan your templates, fix what the scanner reports, walk the site with the tab key, then listen to your two most important pages.

Then read your own alt text against the images, because that is the failure no tool will ever report.

Every page written by Website Builder Studio passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, and the in-app assistant names what still needs a person. None of this is legal advice.

The list itself is set out page by page in the accessibility checklist, which is the version to work through rather than read.

• Scan your templates, not every page — faults live in templates
• Fix what the scanner reports, starting with anything on a contact path
• Walk the whole site with the tab key
• Listen to your two most important pages
• Read your own alt text against the images
• Enlarge the text and check for sideways scrolling
• Write down what you found, with the date