What it does
Most accessibility testing is a snapshot: someone runs a checker, fixes what it finds, and the site quietly drifts back out of compliance as new content goes live. A11ytek Monitor exists to catch that drift.
You add a site, set how many pages to crawl and how often, and it does the rest — crawling, testing, scoring, recording and alerting you when something slips, so you can show whether accessibility is improving or getting worse.
- Multi-page crawler — follows same-origin links and seeds from your
sitemap.xml, with configurable page and depth limits.
- axe-core testing — every automatable WCAG A and AA rule through 2.2, plus best-practice checks, on every page it finds.
- Mapped to success criteria — every issue is tagged with the WCAG criterion it breaches, so a report turns straight into a work list.
- Severity and score — issues are graded critical, serious, moderate or minor, and rolled into a transparent 0–100 score.
- History and trends — every scan is kept, and the dashboard charts your score over time.
- Regression detection — each scan is compared with the last, so you see exactly which issues are new, which are fixed, and which are still outstanding.
- Alerts when the score drops — Slack or email, triggered by a threshold you set or by any fall against the previous scan. Nobody has to remember to check the dashboard.
- One-click PDF reports — a branded, client-ready report of any scan: score, priorities in plain English, every issue by WCAG criterion, and the pages tested.
- Scheduling — set a cron schedule per site and let it re-scan automatically.
- Command line too — scan without running the server at all, so it drops into a build pipeline.
What it does not do — and why that matters
Automated testing finds roughly a third of WCAG problems. It reliably catches missing alt text, insufficient contrast, unlabelled form fields and broken heading structure. It cannot tell you whether your alt text is meaningful, whether your tab order makes sense, or whether a screen-reader user can actually complete your checkout.
It tests web pages, not documents. PDFs, Word files and presentations are not scanned — those need document remediation, which is a separate service.
Any vendor implying their scanner makes you compliant is selling you something that does not exist. A11ytek Monitor is built to handle the third a machine can do well, so that expert manual review — the part that genuinely determines compliance — is spent where it counts.
If you need that manual layer, that is our audit service, and the two work well together: continuous automated coverage between periodic expert reviews.
Two ways to run it
Most organisations want the reporting without the running. Some cannot let scan data leave their network at all. Both are supported.
Managed by A11ytek — the usual choice
We host it, we keep it running, and you get a private sign-in at your own web address. Your scans, your sites and your history sit in a database used by nobody else — each client gets a separate instance, so no other organisation's data is ever visible from your dashboard.
You add nothing to your infrastructure and maintain nothing. Scans run to a schedule you choose, reports arrive on time, and if the score drops you hear about it.
Self-hosted — for closed networks
Monitoring platforms are usually sold as SaaS, which means internal URLs, staging environments and defect history live on somebody else's servers. For public sector bodies, banks, healthcare providers and law firms, that is often the reason a monitoring project stalls.
Run under licence inside your own environment, A11ytek Monitor stores everything in a local database and transmits nothing to A11ytek or anyone else. It will scan sites that are not reachable from the public internet — staging, intranets, systems behind a VPN — which hosted scanners cannot reach at all.
This option is licensed per organisation and quoted separately. Talk to us if your data genuinely cannot leave your network.
The dashboard is itself accessible
It would be a poor advertisement for an accessibility company to ship an accessibility tool you could not use with a screen reader. The dashboard is built to WCAG AA: semantic landmarks, skip links, visible focus states, keyboard operability throughout, and support for reduced-motion preferences.
What is involved
Managed: nothing on your side. Send us the addresses you want covered and we do the rest. You receive a sign-in, and the first scan usually completes the same week.
Self-hosted: Node.js 20 or newer, and any machine that can reach the sites you want to scan. Chromium installs automatically. Setup is three commands, and we can do the installation with you.
Who it is for
- In-house accessibility and QA teams who need evidence that standards are holding as the site changes.
- Public-sector and regulated organisations under AODA, ADA or EN 301 549 obligations, where scan data cannot leave the network.
- Agencies monitoring accessibility across a portfolio of client sites.
- Development teams who want an accessibility gate in CI via the command-line scanner.
Pricing
Plans start free — one website and 25 pages, no card and no sales call — and run to $600 a month for a larger estate with the reporting handled for you. See the full price list.
There are no per-scan fees and no per-seat charges: everyone at your organisation who needs to see the dashboard can have a sign-in. Purchase orders and net-30 invoicing are available for councils and public bodies.
Self-hosted licensing is quoted per organisation and includes setup support and updates. Get in touch for a number, plus a demo of the dashboard running against your own site.
Monitoring works best alongside periodic expert review — see monitoring & reporting for the full service, which adds quarterly manual re-testing of critical journeys.