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 — WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 A and AA rules, 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.
Why self-hosted
Monitoring platforms are usually sold as SaaS, which means your 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.
A11ytek Monitor runs entirely inside your own environment. It stores its data in a local SQLite database, and nothing is transmitted to A11ytek or anyone else. It will happily scan sites that are not reachable from the public internet — staging, intranets, systems behind a VPN — which hosted scanners simply cannot reach.
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 you need to run it
- Node.js 20 or newer
- Chromium — installed automatically by Playwright on first run
- Any machine that can reach the sites you want to scan — a laptop is enough to start
Installation is three commands, and the dashboard then runs at localhost:4600. Full setup instructions are included.
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.
Licensing
A11ytek Monitor is licensed per organisation, and includes the full source, setup support and updates. Because it is self-hosted there are no per-page or per-scan fees — scan as many pages, as often, as your own hardware allows.
Pricing depends on how many sites you are monitoring and whether you want us to handle installation and configuration. Get in touch for a quote and we will give you a straight number and a demo of the dashboard against your own site.
Prefer not to run it yourself? We also operate it for you as a managed service, sending you scheduled reports and flagging regressions — see accessibility monitoring & reporting.