AccessMate – Accessibility Scanner with AI Suggestions and Lightweight Toolbar. WCAG, ADA & EAA

Accessibility work usually costs you a loop. Copy a URL. Paste it into an off-site scanner. Wait. Hit the free-tier limit. Read a report that tells you what is broken but not what to type. Switch to your editor. Guess at the fix. Go back, paste the URL again, and start over — for every page, every time the site changes.

AccessMate closes that loop inside WordPress. Scan from your dashboard, see every issue ranked by severity, copy an AI-suggested code fix straight into your editor, and re-scan in a click. No tab-switching, no re-pasting URLs, no per-scan credits.

Why developers pick AccessMate

• The whole site, in one place — scan your pages from the Pages & Posts list and see them together: score, letter grade, issue count and last scan date per page, with the worst offenders ranked so you know where to start
• Fixes you can paste, not homework — most scanners hand you a rule name and a spec link. AccessMate shows the offending markup, the exact success criterion, and — with AI enabled — a corrected code snippet you copy into your editor
• Scan the page you are looking at — hit Scan Page in the admin bar on any front-end page and results slide in over the live site. No going back to the dashboard to check your work
• Catch regressions before your client does — accessibility is not a one-off project. Re-scan after a redesign, a new plugin or a content push and see immediately whether anything you shipped broke what was working
• A toolbar, not an overlay — visitor comfort controls without the price tag or the promises

A toolbar, not an overlay

AccessMate’s visitor toolbar does one honest thing: it lets visitors adjust how your site is displayed — larger text, higher contrast, a dyslexia-friendly font, reduced motion. It is 15KB, loads deferred, and renders in a Shadow DOM so it cannot touch your theme’s styles.

What it deliberately does not do is rewrite your markup, inject ARIA it cannot understand, or claim to make your site compliant. No front-end script can do that. Real accessibility comes from fixing the underlying code — which is exactly what the scanner half of AccessMate is built to help you do, quickly.

Core features

• Accessibility scanner — powered by axe-core, scans your pages against your choice of WCAG standard, or several combined at once
• Score & letter grade — every scanned page gets a 0–100 score and an A/B/C/D/F grade, calculated from passed checks against failures weighted by Critical/Serious/Warning/Notice severity
• Site-wide scanning — AccessMate discovers the public URLs on your site and scans them individually, with per-page results, search, and post-type filtering
• Scan from the front end — a “Scan Page” button in the admin bar scans whatever page you are viewing and shows results in a slide-in panel, with filter tabs for Critical, Serious and Passed checks and a ruleset switcher for re-scanning
• Issues by page — stacked bar chart showing critical/serious/warning/notice counts per page
• Issue detail panel — shows the offending HTML, the WCAG success criterion with a link to the spec, the CSS selector, and the affected element count
• Passed checks — AccessMate records what passed, not just what failed, so you can show progress
• Accessibility statement generator — a five-step wizard that produces a published accessibility statement page for your site
• Visitor accessibility toolbar — floating widget with 10 user-controlled accessibility features, configurable colour, position and button size
• AI fix suggestions (requires API key) — explains what to change and generates a corrected code snippet
• AI explanations (requires API key) — plain-English summaries of an issue for non-technical site owners

WCAG standards & rulesets

AccessMate scans with axe-core, the same open-source accessibility testing engine used by major browser DevTools. Pick any one of the following from the ruleset selector in the scanner or in Settings:

• WCAG 2.0 — A, AA, or AAA
• WCAG 2.1 — A, AA, or AAA
• WCAG 2.2 — AA
• Section 508
• Best Practice — common accessibility recommendations beyond the WCAG spec
• Combined presets — Best Practice + WCAG 2.0 AA, + WCAG 2.1 AA, or + WCAG 2.2 AA

Visitor accessibility toolbar features

• Font size
• High contrast
• Dyslexia font
• Grayscale
• Reading guide
• Pause animations
• Line height
• Large cursor
• Highlight links
• Screen mask

Each feature can be switched on or off in the Widget configurator, along with the accent colour, screen position and button size. The toolbar renders inside a Shadow DOM, so its styles cannot affect your theme, and visitor preferences are remembered in their browser’s localStorage.

AI providers supported

• Anthropic Claude (claude-haiku-4-5, claude-sonnet-4)
• OpenAI (gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4o)
• Google Gemini (gemini-1.5-flash, gemini-1.5-pro)
• Ollama (local, no key needed — llama3.2, mistral, phi3)

Privacy

AccessMate makes no external requests unless you configure an AI provider and trigger an AI action. When an AI action is triggered, your WordPress server makes a direct request to your chosen provider using your key. No data passes through AccessMate servers. The API key is encrypted at rest using AES-256-CBC with your WordPress auth salt.

The OpenDyslexic font used by the toolbar’s dyslexia feature is bundled inside the plugin and served from your own site. No font CDN is contacted.

Third Party Libraries

• axe-core by Deque Systems — Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0)
• OpenDyslexic font via Fontsource — Bitstream Vera Fonts License — bundled with the plugin and served locally; no CDN request is made

External Services

This plugin can connect to the following external services. No external requests are made unless you explicitly configure and trigger the relevant feature.

AI providers (optional)

When you add an API key and click an AI action (fix suggestion or plain-English explanation), your WordPress server sends a direct HTTPS request to your chosen AI provider. The request contains the page HTML snippet and accessibility issue context being analysed. No data passes through AccessMate servers. These requests are only sent when you have entered an API key in Settings and manually trigger an AI action.

Anthropic — https://api.anthropic.com/
Used for: AI fix suggestions and plain-English issue explanations.
Data sent: page HTML snippet, accessibility issue context, and your Anthropic API key (in the request header).
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy

OpenAI — https://api.openai.com/
Used for: AI fix suggestions and plain-English issue explanations.
Data sent: page HTML snippet, accessibility issue context, and your OpenAI API key (in the request header).
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy

Google Gemini — https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/
Used for: AI fix suggestions and plain-English issue explanations.
Data sent: page HTML snippet, accessibility issue context, and your Gemini API key (as a URL parameter).
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy

Ollama — http://localhost:11434/ (local only)
Ollama runs entirely on the user’s own machine or local network. No data is sent to any external server.

Source Code

The admin interface and scan overlay are built from TypeScript and React sources with Vite. The unminified sources are included in this plugin under /src and /widget, alongside package.json, tsconfig.json and the Vite configuration files. To rebuild the bundles in /assets, run npm install followed by npm run build.