A11y Shield
Accessibility compliance as an automated loop
- Client
- lukeduff.co.uk
- Service
- Own product
- Where
- United Kingdom
One screen, as it shipped. a11y-shield.vercel.app
The European Accessibility Act requires a lot of businesses to make their sites accessible and publish a conformance statement. A11y Shield crawls a whole site rather than just the homepage, audits every page with a real accessibility engine, scores it against the standard, writes the statement and a fix plan, then watches for regressions on each deploy. Still in build, not taking sign-ups yet.
What I set out to do
- Crawl an entire site and audit every page for real accessibility problems, not just the homepage.
- Score sites against the EAA and EN 301 549 standard in a way a non-developer can understand and act on.
- Generate the legally required accessibility statement as both a hosted page and a downloadable PDF.
- Produce a remediation plan that lists every issue with severity and effort estimates so a team can work through it systematically.
- Monitor for regressions on every deploy, so a passing score has to be maintained rather than just reached once.
What came out of it
- A complete audit engine covering crawling, per-page analysis, scoring and statement generation, built as a Next.js app with a separate headless-browser worker.
- A scoring model designed to be stable and meaningful rather than a raw count of violations.
- Automated output of both the hosted accessibility statement page and a PDF, plus an exportable remediation plan.
- Regression monitoring baked in so that passing a check is the start of compliance, not the end of it.
- Multi-tenant architecture with per-organisation data separation from the ground up.