How to Run a Free Accessibility Scan on Your School Website

Wondering whether your school or government website meets ADA accessibility requirements? The fastest way to find out is to run an automated scan. AccessEval’s free scanner checks your site against WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards and delivers a plain-English report in under two minutes. Here is how to use it.

Step 1: Go to the AccessEval homepage

Visit accesseval.com and you will see a URL input field right on the homepage. No account creation, no credit card, no setup required.

Step 2: Enter your website URL

Type or paste the full URL of the page you want to scan — for example, https://www.yourschool.edu. The free scan checks a single page at a time, so start with your homepage since it typically contains your navigation, header, footer, and most common design patterns.

Step 3: Wait for your results

AccessEval uses Playwright (a real browser) and axe-core (the industry standard accessibility testing engine) to crawl your page. The scan usually completes in 30 to 90 seconds. You will see a progress indicator while it runs.

Step 4: Review your report

Your results include:

• A letter grade (A through F) that gives you an instant sense of where you stand
• Issue counts by severity — critical, serious, moderate, and minor
• Plain-English descriptions of each issue, written for non-technical readers
• Specific locations on the page where each issue was found

Step 5: Decide on next steps

A single-page scan is a great starting point, but most school websites have dozens or hundreds of pages. Common next steps include:

• Sharing the report with your IT team or web vendor to start addressing critical issues
• Scanning additional pages — your calendar, staff directory, and enrollment forms are good candidates
• Creating an AccessEval account to scan your full site, track fixes over time, and generate compliance documentation

What automated scans can and cannot do

Automated tools like AccessEval can detect roughly 30 to 50 percent of all possible accessibility barriers. They are excellent at catching structural issues like missing alt text, low contrast, missing labels, and heading order problems. However, some aspects of accessibility — like whether alt text is actually meaningful, or whether the tab order makes logical sense — require human judgment.

That said, an automated scan is the best first step. The issues it finds are real, and fixing them will meaningfully improve your site’s accessibility for users with disabilities.

Ready to see where your site stands? Run your free scan now — it takes less than two minutes.