If you read my last article on the 10 accessibility quick wins your website might be missing, you'll know that WCAG 2.2 AA compliance isn't just a legal obligation under the European Accessibility Act. It's a commercial opportunity that most Irish businesses are leaving on the table.
But knowing what to fix is only useful if you can first find what's broken.
The good news is that some of the most powerful accessibility testing tools in the world are completely free. They're used by developers, designers, and accessibility consultants every day, and many of them require zero technical knowledge to run.
A quick note before you start
No automated tool can catch every accessibility issue. Research consistently shows that automated scanners identify roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG failures. The rest require human judgement, real user testing, and manual checks. Think of these tools as your first line of investigation, not your final sign-off. They will surface the obvious, fixable issues quickly, which is exactly where you want to start.
01. WAVE by WebAIM
WAVE is one of the most widely used accessibility evaluation tools in the world, and it's the best starting point for anyone new to accessibility testing. You can either visit wave.webaim.org and enter your website URL directly, or install the free browser extension for Chrome or Firefox and run it on any page with a single click.
What it does: WAVE overlays icons and indicators directly on top of your webpage, showing you exactly where issues exist in context. Red icons indicate errors, yellow icons flag alerts worth investigating, and green icons confirm things that are working correctly.
Why it's valuable for non-developers: You don't need to read a report or interpret a spreadsheet. The issues appear on the page itself, so you can see immediately what a screen reader user or keyboard user would encounter.
What to do with it: Run WAVE on your homepage, your contact page, and your most important conversion page. Screenshot the results and share them with your developer or agency. Ask them to work through the red errors first.
02. Axe DevTools (Free Browser Extension)
Axe, built by Deque Systems, is the accessibility testing engine that powers many professional auditing workflows. The free browser extension brings that same engine directly into your browser's developer tools. It is notable for having a zero false positives policy — meaning every issue it flags is a genuine problem, not a guess.
What it does: Axe analyses the page you're viewing and produces a clear list of accessibility violations, organised by impact level: critical, serious, moderate, and minor. Each issue includes a plain English description, which WCAG criteria it violates, and guidance on how to fix it.
Why it's valuable: Because it produces no false positives, the results are reliable. When you share an Axe report with a developer, every item on the list is genuinely worth fixing.
What to do with it: Install the extension, open your browser's developer tools (usually by pressing F12), navigate to the Axe tab, and click Analyse. Export the results and use them as a prioritised fix list for your development team.
03. Silktide Accessibility Checker
Silktide is a browser extension built with non-technical users firmly in mind. Where many accessibility tools present their findings in ways that assume coding knowledge, Silktide is designed to be understood by anyone, including marketing managers, content editors, and business owners who simply want to know what's wrong and why it matters.
What it does: Silktide analyses the page you're on and presents issues in plain, jargon-free language. It groups findings by category, explains the real-world impact of each issue on actual users, and scores your page so you have a clear sense of where you stand.
Why it's valuable: Silktide doesn't just tell you something is broken. It tells you what kind of person is affected, why it matters to them, and what the consequence is if it's left unfixed. For anyone making the business case for accessibility investment internally, that framing is genuinely useful.
04. Colour Contrast CC
Contrast is one of the most common and most impactful accessibility failures on Irish websites. Colour Contrast CC is a clean, straightforward web tool that lets you check the contrast ratio between any two colours instantly, with no download or installation required.
What it does: You enter or paste two hex colour codes — one for your text and one for your background — and the tool immediately calculates the contrast ratio between them. It tells you clearly whether the combination passes or fails WCAG AA and AAA standards for normal text, large text, and non-text elements.
What to do with it: Find the hex codes for your main text colour and your background colour. Paste them into colourcontrast.cc and check the result. Then repeat for your call-to-action buttons, navigation links, and any coloured banners on your site. Anything that fails 4.5:1 for normal text needs to be flagged for adjustment.
05. Accessibility Insights for Web
Accessibility Insights is Microsoft's free accessibility testing extension, and it offers something the other tools don't: a guided manual testing workflow called Assessment that walks you step by step through a complete WCAG audit — including the checks that automated tools simply cannot do.
What it does: The tool has two modes. FastPass runs an automated check and highlights issues in seconds, similar to Axe. Assessment mode guides you through a structured series of manual checks, such as testing keyboard navigation and verifying that focus order makes logical sense.
Why it's valuable: It bridges the gap between automated scanning and real human testing. The Assessment mode is particularly useful if you want to go deeper than a basic scan without needing to know WCAG inside out.
06. HeadingsMap
Heading structure is one of the most commonly broken accessibility requirements and one of the easiest to overlook visually. HeadingsMap is a simple extension that extracts all the headings from any webpage and displays them as a structured outline, so you can immediately see whether the hierarchy makes sense.
What it does: Click the extension icon on any page and a sidebar opens showing every heading in order, indented by level (H1, H2, H3, and so on). Missing levels, duplicate H1s, and illogical jumps in the hierarchy are immediately obvious.
What to do with it: Run HeadingsMap on every key page of your site. You're looking for one H1 per page, logical nesting without skipping levels, and headings that reflect the actual content structure rather than visual styling choices.
07. Screen Reader Testing with NVDA or VoiceOver
No automated tool can tell you what it actually feels like to use your website without vision. For that, you need a screen reader. NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) is a free, open-source screen reader for Windows. VoiceOver is built into every Mac, iPhone, and iPad and costs nothing to activate.
What it does: A screen reader reads out everything on the screen, in the order the code presents it — including headings, links, buttons, images via alt text, form labels, and error messages. Using one on your own website is one of the most revealing things you can do.
What to do with it: On a Mac, press Command + F5 to activate VoiceOver. On an iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver. On Windows, download NVDA free from nvaccess.org. Then try to navigate your homepage, find your contact information, and complete a form using only what you can hear.
How to use these tools together
You don't need to use all seven at once. A practical starting point for any Irish business: start with WAVE or Silktide if you're non-technical, or Axe if you want more precise, developer-ready output. Use HeadingsMap on your key pages to check structural issues that affect both accessibility and SEO. Use Colour Contrast CC to check any colour combinations that browser tools might miss.
When you're ready to go deeper, use Accessibility Insights Assessment mode to work through manual checks, and turn on VoiceOver or NVDA to experience your site the way a screen reader user would.
Document everything. Screenshots, scores, and tool reports give you evidence of where you started, what you improved, and how far you've come. This matters both for your own records and for demonstrating compliance under the European Accessibility Act.