# Accesserty DevCheck

Accesserty DevCheck is a free browser extension for anyone who checks pages before release or handoff, with no accessibility background needed: find issues on the real page, judge what scanners can't, and show your team or client why a fix matters.

## Purpose

Check staging sites, signed-in views and local builds in your own browser. Start with machine-detectable issues, then review the items that need human judgment. Optional AI sends sampled content separately; check that it is suitable to send and read the full disclosure first.

Check a form after an error appears or a dialog opens. After a fix, return to the same state and check again so your team can review the result.

What does AI send? https://accesserty.com/en/devcheck/#devcheck-ai-disclosure

The main audience is anyone who checks pages before release: designers, PMs, QA, content editors and engineers, with no accessibility background needed. Teams delivering client sites can also check staging before handoff, and reproduce and re-test audit findings in the same page state. DevCheck checks localhost, staging sites, pages behind a login, CMS previews and local PDFs. Start with Scan, then Review and keyboard testing. Copy summaries into an existing issue tracker; DevCheck does not provide tracking or assignment itself.

## Try your first check

Follow the simplified button-name example: https://accesserty.com/en/devcheck/#first-check

No code needed: https://accesserty.com/en/devcheck-practice/ is a fictional demo page with a button without a name, an image without alternative text and a status shown only by color. Scan it with DevCheck, find the issues, press "Apply the fix" and scan again. The page is excluded from search results and sends no data.

To try it on your own test page:

On an editable test page such as localhost, a button containing only an aria-hidden icon has no accessible name. Choose Scan → Scan this page, inspect the button-name finding and activate the element entry to try highlighting it. Add visible text such as “Add contact”, reload and rescan the same state. That button should no longer produce this finding; keyboard behavior, screen-reader announcements and the actual application action still require testing. The example button does not add data, and AI is not required.

Needs manual review is not a confirmed error, and no findings is not proof of WCAG conformance. Review copied summaries before sharing. For PDFs, select a local file from the PDF checker under Scan, not the browser’s built-in PDF viewer.

## Capabilities

- Find issues: axe-core scans for WCAG 2.0–2.2 A/AA and best-practice findings separate confirmed issues from items needing manual review, list affected elements with readable names that can be highlighted on the page, and report locating failures.
- Judge what a scanner can't: Focus Path shows estimated candidate focus order with numbered markers, connecting lines, and a mini map; Heading Structure shows the h1–h6 outline, including screen-reader-only headings; Landmark Regions draws header, nav, main, and other landmarks as page regions; accessible names, form labels and error messages, a reading preview and stop motion complete the review lenses. Orange hints mean manual review, not automated WCAG failures.
- Show why a fix matters: simulations for color vision differences, low vision, visual field loss, text spacing, reading difficulty and touch target conflicts, a magnifier that follows the mouse and focus, hand tremor, and a silent mode that reports sounds and lists media without captions.
- Check PDFs without uploading them: structure signals for tags, bookmarks, links, images, form fields and page-size consistency in a local file. For now, confirm the document language in your PDF reader or editor; DevCheck showing “No language set” is not enough to establish a problem.
- AI Check (optional) reviews link purpose from names and surrounding text, language marking, and image alt quality. It does not inspect link destinations to verify their content. Results show sent, excluded and skipped counts; no findings means only that none were found in this sample.
- Chrome / Edge and Firefox extension based inspection.

Focus Path estimates a route from the current page's candidate elements, DOM order and tabindex; it does not record actual Tab presses. Radio groups and composite controls do not necessarily provide one Tab stop per point. Test the task with Tab, Shift + Tab and the relevant arrow keys. Open shadow roots can be included; frame content and closed shadow roots need separate checks.

## Optional AI: data and result boundaries

Simulations, manual review lenses, axe-core checks, and PDF checks primarily run locally in the browser. AI Check is the exception: only after explicit user action, it sends a bounded sample of page text, link names and surrounding text, plus selected page-readable images, their alt text and enclosing link or button naming context to Google Gemini for analysis. It omits dedicated page/destination/image-source URL fields. URLs appearing in sampled text, names or images may still be transmitted.

Naming metadata may include visually hidden ARIA references and SVG titles. Editable content and some CSS-hidden text are excluded. Clipped or off-screen text may still be sampled; this is not a sensitive-data detector. Shared AI passes through Accesserty with an instance ID and IP-derived hash for quotas; a custom key goes directly to Google. Under Google's unpaid-service terms, inputs and outputs may be used for improvement and human review. Supplying your own key does not itself exclude those uses; project billing status and applicable regional terms matter. Do not submit confidential, unauthorized or personal information to unpaid AI. User-requested local report exports may include the page URL and sampled text; review before sharing. See https://accesserty.com/en/privacy/ and https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms.

AI samples the document and open shadow roots, but does not traverse frames or closed shadow roots. It may skip images because of cross-origin protection, loading or encoding limits.

AI separately marks complete, partial and unusable results. Valid records can remain when other records are discarded, and missing image responses are disclosed. Incomplete or unusable results do not mean there are no issues; copied reports and JSON exports preserve that distinction.

## Go deeper when you need to

You do not need to read every guide. Choose one for the task in front of you, and check PDFs separately when they are part of it.

1. Define the page and release scope: https://accesserty.com/en/guides/accessibility-testing-before-launch/
2. Review keyboard and focus path: https://accesserty.com/en/guides/how-to-check-keyboard-focus-path/
3. Turn findings into a remediation plan: https://accesserty.com/en/guides/web-accessibility-remediation-plan/

Browse all accessibility guides: https://accesserty.com/en/guides/

## Who It Is For

- Anyone who checks pages before release: designers, PMs, QA, content editors and engineers, with no accessibility background needed (main audience)
- Teams delivering client sites
- Teams building public-sector sites, checking before an accessibility review or acceptance testing, alongside the checkers they already use
- Component library and design system maintainers

## Positioning Limits

DevCheck is not an ADA compliance checker, legal certification tool, or replacement for complete manual audits and assistive technology testing. Its value is moving self-checks earlier, before release, keeping what is confirmed apart from what still needs human judgment, and leaving findings that can be discussed, tracked, and re-tested. Orange hints in review lenses are manual review prompts, not automated WCAG failure decisions.

Simulations offer review clues, not a complete representation of disabled people's experiences or a substitute for testing with users.

## Current Entry Point

Start with Scan, then Review and actual keyboard testing; AI is not required. Review summaries before sharing them in your issue tracker, then re-test the same page state after a fix.

Local scans, review lenses, simulations and PDF checks are free, with no DevCheck paid plan. Optional shared AI has daily and rate limits. Your own Gemini API key uses Google quotas, pricing and data terms; it is not unlimited or necessarily free.

Browser-internal and store pages are protected. Re-scan or refresh review lenses after page changes. Protected frames and closed shadow roots may not be locatable. PDF checks are structure signals, not PDF/UA conformance.

- Product page: https://accesserty.com/en/devcheck/
- Web accessibility checker: https://accesserty.com/en/web-accessibility-checker/
- Understand WCAG check results: https://accesserty.com/en/wcag-compliance-tool/
- PDF accessibility checker: https://accesserty.com/en/pdf-accessibility-checker/
- WCAG testing checklist: https://accesserty.com/en/guides/wcag-testing-checklist/
- Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/accesserty-devcheck/ompbhahmipenipgiiiehbkiibkonoeec
- Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/accesserty-devcheck/