How to Run a DIY ADA Website Audit This Afternoon (Free Tools + When to Call a Pro)

You can learn a lot in an afternoon

You do not need to wait for a demand letter — or a five-figure invoice — to find out whether your website has accessibility problems. With free tools and about two hours, you can surface the majority of the issues a plaintiff's firm would screen for. This guide walks through a practical self-audit anyone on your team can run today.

One honest caveat up front: automated tools catch only about a third of WCAG issues. The rest require human judgment. That is exactly why this guide pairs automated scanning with manual testing — and why it ends with a clear explanation of when you genuinely need a professional audit.

Step 1 — Run automated scans

Start broad. Automated scans are fast and will immediately surface the high-frequency, machine-detectable failures.

• Run our free compliance checker on your most important pages — home, a primary product or service page, and your contact or checkout page.
• Cross-check with a browser-based tool such as axe DevTools, WAVE, or Lighthouse's accessibility audit.
• Use the color contrast checker on your body text, buttons, and any text over images.
• Run the heading structure validator to spot skipped or out-of-order headings.

Record what each tool flags. Expect overlap — that is good. Anything multiple tools agree on is a priority.

Step 2 — The keyboard test (the most revealing five minutes)

Put your mouse away. Using only the keyboard, try to operate each page:

• Press Tab to move forward and Shift+Tab to move back. Can you reach every interactive element — links, buttons, form fields, menus?
• Is the focus indicator always visible so you can see where you are?
• Is the order logical, following the visual layout?
• Can you operate menus, accordions, sliders, and modals — and escape them — without a mouse?
• Is there a "skip to content" link at the very top?
• Most important: Can you complete your primary task (buy, book, contact) with the keyboard alone?

If you get stuck anywhere, so does every keyboard and switch user. Our keyboard accessibility guide explains what good looks like.

Step 3 — A screen reader spot check

You do not need to be an expert. Turn on the screen reader already on your device — VoiceOver on Mac (Cmd+F5) or NVDA on Windows (free download) — and listen to a couple of key pages:

• Do images convey meaning, or do you hear file names and "image"?
• Are form fields announced with a clear label, or just "edit text"?
• Do buttons and links have meaningful names, or do you hear "button" and "link" with no context?
• Can you navigate by headings, and do they describe the content?

Fifteen minutes of listening teaches you more about your site than any score.

Step 4 — Check the "Big Six" by hand

Six failure types account for the overwhelming majority of detectable accessibility errors across the web. Confirm each on your own pages:

1. Low-contrast text — verify with the contrast checker.
2. Missing alternative text on meaningful images — see our alt text guide.
3. Unlabeled form inputs — every field needs a real, programmatic label.
4. Empty links — links whose only content is an icon or image with no accessible name.
5. Empty buttons — icon-only buttons (search, menu, cart) with no label.
6. Missing page language — confirm your HTML has a lang attribute.

If you fix only these six categories, you eliminate most of what automated scans and plaintiff firms flag first.

Step 5 — Walk your critical user flows

Finally, test the journeys that matter most to your business end to end — with keyboard and screen reader: main navigation and search, your primary forms, and your checkout or contact flow. A barrier on a marketing page is a problem; a barrier in checkout is a lawsuit waiting to happen and lost revenue today.

When to call a professional

A DIY audit is genuinely valuable — it will catch the obvious issues and give you a prioritized to-do list. But you should bring in a professional audit when:

• You need documented WCAG 2.1 AA conformance (for example, under ADA Title III, the HHS Section 504 rule, or the European Accessibility Act).
• You have received a demand letter and need a complete, defensible record.
• Your site includes complex, custom components — application-like interfaces, custom widgets, data tables, dynamic content.
• You want certainty that the two-thirds of issues automated tools cannot detect have actually been checked by a human.

Manual expert testing is the only way to confirm true conformance, because so much of WCAG depends on context a script cannot evaluate.

Turn findings into a plan

Once you have your list, prioritize by impact and run it against the requirements checklist, then follow our step-by-step remediation guide. A self-audit is the perfect starting point — and if it surfaces more than you can comfortably fix in-house, that is exactly the moment a professional audit pays for itself.