Pa11y: The Free Accessibility Checker That Caught Bugs in Our Own Code
A free, open-source accessibility tester. We ran it on 6 pages of our site and found 39 issues, including contrast bugs we wrote ourselves. We fixed them: 23 errors down to 8.
Pa11y is a free tool that tests a web page against WCAG 2 AA accessibility rules in seconds. pSkyro Labs ran it on 6 pages of its own site and found 39 issues, including contrast bugs it had shipped itself.
What it is
Pa11y opens a page in a real Chrome browser and tests it against WCAG 2 AA, the standard most accessibility rules point to. It lists every failure with the exact element and a fix hint.
See it in action
We ran Pa11y 10.0.0 on 6 pages of a local build of pskyrolabs.com.
39 issues on 6 pages. The Vibe Check page alone had 23, mostly text that was too light to read.
We darkened two orange labels (2.97:1 and 4.23:1 contrast, below the 4.5:1 minimum) to 5.06:1. Same page: 23 errors → 8.
What's left, honestly
- 5 are tiny decorative style previews. They're hidden from screen readers, but Pa11y still checks them.
- 2 are the callback form's name and company fields. Pa11y wants an explicit text type on them. Strict, but a one-line fix.
- 1 is the small "30" badge on our call-to-action box. A real one we still need to fix.
It didn't just complain. Every error came with the exact element, so each fix took minutes.
Why it matters
An e-commerce brand launches a sale page with light grey prices on white. It looks elegant in Figma. On a phone in sunlight, nobody can read it. Pa11y would have caught it before launch, for free.
Try it yourself
What this means for your site
Contrast and form-label bugs are cheap to fix at design stage and annoying to fix after launch. They are part of how pSkyro Labs approaches UI/UX design; see also what UI/UX design involves. Next in the series: Lighthouse, Google's free SEO audit.
The verdict
The fastest free way to catch contrast and form problems. Run it on every new page.
It found real bugs in our own code in under a minute. Star it on GitHub.
FAQ
Is Pa11y free?
Yes. Pa11y is open source (LGPL-3.0) and runs on your own computer with Node.js and a Chrome browser.
What standard does Pa11y test against?
By default WCAG 2 AA, the level most accessibility laws and guidelines point to. It can also test WCAG 2 A and AAA.
Does Pa11y find every accessibility problem?
No automated tool does. Pa11y catches machine-checkable issues like contrast, missing labels and form attributes. You still need to test with a keyboard and a screen reader.