AuditWand Accessibility

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Two engines. One honest scope.

AuditWand finds accessibility issues on your WordPress site, fixes the mechanical ones in one click, and keeps a dated record of the work. Page checks run inside your editor, free and local: the bundled engine checks the page you are writing, drafts included, and nothing leaves your site. Site scans run in the AuditWand cloud on Pro: every page of your live site, with history, alerts, and the documents the European Accessibility Act expects. Both engines find a subset of WCAG issues and say so on every result.

Why website accessibility matters

Accessibility is now a legal expectation in most markets a WordPress site sells into. In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied since 28 June 2025 to many businesses that sell to consumers online, and member states enforce it with fines and orders. In the United States, web accessibility claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are filed by the thousands every year, with demand letters many times more frequent. In Ontario, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requires larger organizations’ public websites to meet WCAG 2.0 AA.

The plain benefits arrive whether or not a law applies to you: more visitors can use the site, including the roughly one in six people who live with a disability; search engines read the same structure and text alternatives that screen readers do; clear labels and readable contrast reduce complaints and abandoned forms.

Two honest notes. Some very small businesses have limited exemptions under the EAA, and whether your site is covered depends on what you sell, to whom, and where; check with a professional rather than taking a plugin’s word for it. And no automated tool, ours included, can make a site accessible or compliant on its own. AuditWand finds what can be found automatically, fixes what can be fixed safely, guides you through the rest, and documents the effort.

What it checks

• The bundled engine. AuditWand ships axe-core 4.13.0 by Deque Systems, unmodified: 89 automated rules, 62 testing WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 success criteria at levels A and AA and 27 best-practice checks such as heading order and landmark structure. The same engine version runs in your editor and in the cloud.
• Plain English on top. 54 of the most common rules carry an AuditWand explanation: what the issue is, who it affects, and how to fix it in WordPress terms. Every issue links to its documentation page with the WCAG success criterion and the EN 301 549 clause.
• Worth reviewing. 3 additional checks flag judgment calls a machine cannot decide: vague link text such as “click here”, images marked decorative that may carry meaning, and links to PDF documents. They never count toward your score.
• Page checks in the editor. Press “Check this page” in the AuditWand box on any post or page, drafts included. The check runs in your browser with the bundled engine and shows results in seconds; the content is not sent anywhere. Unlimited, with or without an account.
• Automatic check on save. Turn it on under Settings and every save runs a page check.
• History, kept locally. Every page check is recorded on your site with its date and counts; the History tab and the dashboard widget show them with no connection at all.
• Site scans (Pro). Every page of your live site is crawled and checked in the cloud, with results streamed into the Issues and Pages tabs as they arrive, a live progress bar, and a delta line after every rescan.

Every rule the engine checks has its own page at https://auditwand.com/docs/issues.

All 16 fixes, free

Every fix is a server-side change to the HTML your site sends to visitors; there is no visitor-side script and no overlay. Each fix is individually switchable, shows a before-and-after preview, is reversible with one click, and is logged with a timestamp when applied or turned off. A master pause suspends every fix at once. Fixes an accessibility-ready theme already provides are never applied twice.

• Skip-to-content link. Adds a “Skip to content” link as the first element of every page, invisible until a keyboard user reaches it.
• Visible keyboard focus. Draws a clear outline around links, buttons, and fields when they receive keyboard focus.
• Underline links in content. Underlines links inside post and page content, so a link never depends on color alone.
• Warn on new-tab links. Adds a screen-reader note “(opens in a new tab)” to links that open new tabs, plus rel protection.
• Stop links opening new tabs. Removes target=”_blank” from content links, so every link opens in the same tab.
• Label the search field. Gives the WordPress search box an accessible label and requires a search term before submitting.
• Label comment fields. Ensures the comment textarea carries a proper label, which many themes omit.
• Language & direction attributes. Declares the page language, and right-to-left direction where used, so screen readers pick the right voice.
• Allow zooming on mobile. Removes the viewport settings that stop people from pinch-zooming on phones.
• Remove forced tab order. Removes positive tabindex values that override the natural keyboard order.
• Remove redundant tooltips. Removes title-attribute tooltips from links and images, which usually repeat the visible text.
• Fallback page titles. Gives pages without a title one built from your site name, since the title is announced first.
• Label unlabeled form fields (heuristic). Gives form fields that have only a placeholder an accessible label built from that placeholder.
• File type & size on document links. Appends notes such as “(PDF, 1.2 MB)” to document links, so readers know what a link opens.
• Block PDF uploads. Stops new PDF files from entering the media library. Existing files are untouched.
• Accessibility statement link in the footer. Adds an “Accessibility statement” link at the end of every page, pointing at the page you set in Settings.

Every fix is free on every plan, with or without an account. What each fix changes and when not to use it: https://auditwand.com/docs/fixes

Media Library Audit

Missing alt text is the most common accessibility failure on the web, and no scanner can fix it for you, because only a person knows what an image means. The Media tab shows every image in your media library with its alt-text state (missing, deliberately decorative, or described) and where it is used, and you write or edit the alt text in place.

The fix-in-sequence workflow is the missing-alt filter: every image without alt text in one list, each with its alt field in place and a one-click decorative marker, so you work through them one after another. A short guide on writing good alt text sits beside the list. You stay the author: AuditWand never writes alt text for you and never sends your images anywhere. Entirely free, on your own site. No other accessibility plugin in the directory offered a media-wide alt-text view when we surveyed the category in August 2026.

Guide: https://auditwand.com/docs/media-library-audit

Why AuditWand

• Media Library Audit (market first). Every image in your media library with its alt-text state, where it is used, and a fix-in-sequence workflow for the missing ones. Free on every plan; no other accessibility plugin in the directory offered a media-wide alt-text view when we surveyed the category in August 2026.
• Drafts never leave your site. Page checks run in your browser with the bundled engine. Nothing is uploaded until you choose to connect and run a cloud scan. An automated consent suite installs the plugin fresh, walks every screen, and fails the build on a single outbound request before you connect.
• Data stored in Frankfurt. Scan data lives in the EU. The database is in Frankfurt and the application servers are in Falkenstein, Germany. A data processing agreement is included on every plan at no charge; the sub-processor list names each provider, its location, and its transfer mechanism.
• Mapped to EN 301 549 clauses. Every issue names the WCAG success criterion and the EN 301 549 clause, so what you read matches what an EU authority reads. 62 of the 89 rules carry a clause mapping, taken from the engine’s own metadata and published on each issue’s documentation page.
• Monitoring that does not depend on you. Site scans run in the cloud, so results, alerts, and summaries arrive whether or not anyone opens WordPress. Regression alerts state what broke and where; weekly and monthly summaries arrive by email; a scan with failed pages is reported as failed, never as clean.
• All 16 fixes, free. Server-side changes to your real HTML, individually switchable, reversible, and logged. Never a visitor-side overlay. The fix registry carries no plan tier, and an automated test fails the build if one ever appears.

Tiny by design. The plugin zip is 283 KB across 19 files, most of it the bundled engine. Your visitors receive nothing from AuditWand: no scripts, no styles, no cookies, no tracking. A fix you switch on adds exactly that fix’s HTML and a few hundred bytes of CSS. Tests enforce zero visitor weight on every release.

Honest by design. Automated testing finds a subset of WCAG issues. AuditWand tells you what it found and how to fix it. It does not and cannot make your site “compliant” or guarantee protection from legal claims. Treat any tool that claims otherwise with suspicion.

Cloud service (optional)

No account is needed for page checks and fixes. A free AuditWand account connects your site for site-wide scans, monitoring, and reports (service, see below). Everything that runs inside the plugin is free and works without a connection. Site scans are part of Pro: every page of your site, checked in the cloud. Prices are shown in USD.

What connects. Press “Connect to AuditWand” under Settings, approve on the AuditWand page, and land back in WordPress connected. One email address creates a free account in the same step. No keys, no code, no meta tags. Disconnect from either side at any time.

What is sent. After you connect, your server sends your site address and page URLs to the AuditWand API, authenticated with a connect key stored on your site. Site scans read your public pages the way any visitor does and store the findings with short HTML snippets. After an editor page check, the plugin reports a bare counter (a check happened, and when); the content is never included. No visitor data, no analytics, no third-party call from your site.

Where it is stored. Scan data is stored in the EU (Frankfurt) on servers in Germany. We use a small number of sub-processors, some US-based, under EU Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Sub-processor list: https://auditwand.com/legal/privacy#sub-processors

Terms of Use: https://auditwand.com/legal/terms · Privacy Policy: https://auditwand.com/legal/privacy · Data Processing Agreement: https://auditwand.com/legal/dpa

Guide: https://auditwand.com/docs/cloud-scanning-and-monitoring

The free plan

The free plan is everything that runs inside the plugin, for one site:

• Unlimited in-editor page checks, running locally in your browser (drafts never leave your site)
• All 16 one-click fixes, including fallback page titles, file type and size on document links, block PDF uploads, and the footer statement link
• Automatic check on save in the editor
• Dismiss any finding with a recorded reason, and the complete Ignore Log
• Plain-English fix guidance and send-to-developer handoffs
• The editor box and the dashboard widget
• Accessibility statement template download
• “Accessibility monitored” badge and a public status page with visitor feedback
• Media Library Audit: every image’s alt-text status in one view, with inline editing and a fix-in-sequence workflow
• History of your recent page checks

What’s in paid plans

Pro ($19/mo or $149/yr, save 35%. 1 site)

See every page, not just the one you’re editing.

• Site scans: every page checked in the cloud, 500 pages per scan, rescan anytime
• Monthly scheduled scans
• Regression alerts by email: what broke and where
• Complete history with trends and a scan-comparison view
• Hosted accessibility statement that updates itself from your scan data
• Dated PDF reports mapped to EN 301 549 / EAA clauses
• Accessibility column in your Posts and Pages lists
• Bulk review and bulk un-ignore
• Element screenshots with View-on-page
• Weekly email summaries
• Priority email support (typically 1-2 business days)
• Priority scan queue and 2 simultaneous scans
• Development and staging sites never count toward the site limit

Business ($49/mo or $399/yr, 5 sites)

• Everything in Pro across 5 sites in one dashboard
• Weekly scheduled scans
• Reports in English, German, and French
• 3 team seats
• 2,000 pages per crawl

Every paid plan: 30-day money-back guarantee · page packs (+2,500 pages per crawl for $10/mo). Full comparison: https://auditwand.com/docs/free-vs-pro

Compatibility

Requires WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4. Verified on every combination of WordPress 6.5, 6.8, 7.0, and 7.1 with PHP 7.4, 8.1, 8.3, and 8.4, with zero PHP notices, plus multisite. The editor box appears in the block editor and the Classic Editor; page-builder sites use the Pages tab. Scans and fixes operate on the final rendered HTML, so any theme or builder works; the tested-with list is in the FAQ.

Support

Email support@auditwand.com or post in the forum at https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/auditwand-accessibility; replies typically arrive within 1 to 2 business days. Security issues: security@auditwand.com, acknowledged within 48 hours. No phone line and no 24/7 desk: AuditWand is a one-person company with automated systems as the team.

Data and privacy

On your site, the plugin stores its settings, the fix log, the Ignore Log, and your page-check history in WordPress options; it creates no tables and no scheduled tasks, and uninstalling removes every option. In the cloud, once connected: your site address, page URLs, scan findings with short HTML snippets, and your account email and plan. Nothing about your visitors is collected; deleting a site or your account erases its cloud data. Details: https://auditwand.com/docs/data-and-privacy and https://auditwand.com/legal/privacy

Source code and build

The bundled data file assets/editor-data.js is generated from assets/src/editor-data.json by build/build-editor-data.cjs; both ship in the plugin, and running the build script with Node rebuilds the compiled file. The bundled engine assets/axe.min.js is axe-core by Deque Systems, unmodified; source: https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core. All other files are hand-written source.

Third-party libraries

This plugin bundles axe-core 4.13.0 by Deque Systems, licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, included unmodified as assets/axe.min.js. Source: https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core