Image generated with AI. Art direction: Grafica.
On 12 October 2026 we ran a free scanner, axe-core 4.10.2, on the front page of this blog to see which accessibility checks it could settle. It is free and it found real problems, two of them: ten picture links on the post cards with no text a screen reader could announce, and four slider buttons pointing at an element that did not exist. We fixed both before this post went out.
Then we moved through the page with the Tab key alone. That found what the scanner had not. These are four checks to do by hand after any scan. The same scanner found no failures on our mortgage calculator demo, and these four still apply there.
1. Where the focus goes
The Tab key moves from link to link. On our front page, the first eleven presses went where they should. The next ten went to a second copy of the header, placed off the screen, so for ten presses the highlighted link could not be seen. None of the scanner’s rules we ran covers it. We have since taken that copy out of the tab order.
Check: press Tab from the top of the page and watch the highlight. Every press should land on something you can see.
2. Whether the focus can be seen
Of the first 40 places the Tab key reached on our front page, 35 showed no outline or ring, only a change of colour, an underline or a background. Whether that is enough is a judgment about contrast and size that a person makes, looking at the screen.
Check: tab through, sit back, and ask whether you can still tell where you are.
3. Text over a picture
The scanner left 43 colour-contrast checks on the same page undecided and marked them for review. In 32 of them the text sits over another element or a gradient, so the colour behind each letter cannot be read from the code alone. A person can see in a second whether the words are readable.
Check: read every line of text placed over an image, at a phone width and at a desktop width. If you have to squint, so does everyone else.
4. Whether a link says where it goes
A scanner checks that a link has a name. It cannot check whether the name makes sense on its own. A page with twelve links called «Read more» passes the checks we ran, and someone who lists the page’s links with a screen reader hears «Read more» twelve times.
Check: read only the link texts on a page, in order. Each should make sense without the sentence around it.
A scanner is the right first step. It is not the review, and no check, by software or by hand, makes a site «compliant» or safe from a complaint. What these four give you is a page more people can use. If you want them run on yours, talk to us.
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