Accessibility audit

Satsu renders your pages in a real browser and checks each one with axe-core, the engine behind most accessibility tooling. The result leads with the verdict that matters legally: does the page pass or fail WCAG 2.1 AA?

Why AA, and why now

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines define three conformance levels — A, AA, AAA. Level AA is the bar laws reference: the European Accessibility Act, implemented in Germany as the BFSG, has applied to most consumer-facing digital services since June 2025. An inaccessible shop or booking flow is no longer just bad UX — it's a compliance issue with warning-letter exposure.

The four principles

WCAG groups every criterion under four principles; the audit scores each separately so you see where the weight is:

• Perceivable — can everyone perceive the content? Alt text, contrast, captions.
• Operable — does everything work without a mouse? Keyboard access, visible focus.
• Understandable — labeled forms, declared language, clear errors.
• Robust — valid markup that assistive technology can interpret.

What automated checks can and cannot prove

axe-core is conservative by design: what it flags is virtually always a real defect, and every finding carries the WCAG criterion, the CSS selector and a code snippet — enough for an AI assistant to fix the exact element. But roughly half of WCAG's criteria need human judgment (is the alt text meaningful? does the focus order make sense?). A green automated run is necessary, not sufficient; treat it as the floor, and sample critical flows manually.

Reading the result

Critical and serious issues fail the verdict outright. The severity groups order the work: fix critical and serious first — they block real users — then work down. Scores are per page and aggregate; a single inaccessible template usually accounts for most instances, so one fix often clears dozens of findings.