How to check a webpage for accessibility before going live

Before a site goes live, most teams check design, spelling, and whether the forms work. Accessibility often gets skipped until a client asks, a lawsuit scare shows up, or someone fails a keyboard-only pass. You do not need a full compliance program to catch the obvious problems first. A focused check on the main page (or the page you are about to publish) is enough to start.

Start with one URL — the homepage, a key landing page, or the page you just finished. Automated tools such as axe-core can flag many machine-detectable issues: missing alt text, low contrast, unlabeled inputs, language attributes, and a range of WCAG 2.0 / 2.1 / 2.2 Level A and AA problems. That list will not catch everything (complex journeys and content quality still need humans), but it is far better than guessing.

Read the results by severity. Critical and serious issues usually block or confuse people using screen readers, keyboards, or high-contrast needs. Fix those before polishing minor ones. Prefer concrete code changes in your HTML, CSS, or components over widgets that claim to “auto-fix” accessibility at runtime. Overlays do not replace remediating the underlying page.

If you are a freelancer, run the check before and after going live so you can show the client what changed. If you built the site yourself, use the same report as a to-do list — or hand it to whoever maintains the code. A cheap one-page report with plain-English explanations is often enough for that conversation; you only need a heavy monitoring platform when you are ready for ongoing, whole-site compliance work.

PlainFix is built for that first step: paste a URL, get an automated scan, then plain-English explanations with code-level fix suggestions. Free scans show counts and a few sample fixes; a full unlock covers the whole page. Try a scan when you are about to go live — it is faster than discovering the same issues from a frustrated user later.