A Lighthouse accessibility alternative

The accessibility category in Google Lighthouse is powered by axe-core, the same engine this scanner uses, so the detected issues overlap heavily. The difference is what you get back. Lighthouse rolls accessibility into a 0–100 score alongside performance, SEO, and best practices, which is handy for a quick health check but easy to misread as "90 means compliant".

This tool is accessibility-only and rule-first: every finding is tied to a specific WCAG success criterion and conformance level, grouped by severity, with the exact failing element. No single score to over-trust, just the concrete list of what fails and why.

• Shareable report. A public link instead of a DevTools panel or a JSON blob, so a client or developer can read it.
• WCAG mapping. Each issue is labelled with its success criterion and Level A/AA, which Lighthouse does not surface as cleanly.
• Gradient contrast. Where text sits on a CSS gradient, axe (and so Lighthouse) marks contrast "needs review". This measures the worst-case stop and returns a real pass or fail.
• CI and agents. A CLI, GitHub Action, and MCP server for gating builds and letting a coding agent act on findings.

Lighthouse is still a great free starting point, especially for a quick all-round audit. This is the next step when you want accessibility detail you can act on and share.

Because both run axe-core, both cover the machine-checkable subset of WCAG and not the whole standard. This scanner says so plainly and flags what still needs a human, so a green result is never mistaken for full compliance.