Show HN: A free accessibility scanner that says what it can't check

A11yScan, a free web accessibility scanner, launched publicly on August 19, 2026, per a Show HN post by author jrichard2026. The tool is available at a11yscan.win at no cost.

The scanner's stated differentiator is transparency about the limits of automated testing. Rather than presenting a clean pass/fail report, it surfaces not only the accessibility issues it detects, but also explicitly tells users which categories of checks it cannot perform automatically. This addresses a common criticism of automated accessibility tools: that they give a false sense of compliance by staying silent on issues they are structurally unable to evaluate.

Web accessibility auditing typically divides into two camps — automated checks, which can reliably catch things like missing alt text, improper heading hierarchy, and insufficient color contrast ratios, and manual checks, which require human judgment to evaluate things like logical reading order, screen reader behavior, and the usability of interactive components. Most automated scanners report only on what they find, leaving users unaware of what still requires manual review. A11yScan's approach of narrating its own blind spots is the explicit value proposition the HN submission leads with.

No funding, team size, incorporation details, or prior milestones are disclosed in the available source material. The project was posted to Hacker News under the "Show HN" tag, which typically indicates an independent or early-stage product seeking community feedback. At the time of publication, the post had one point and no comments, per Hacker News.

The accessibility tooling space includes established players such as axe by Deque, WAVE by WebAIM, and Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools), all of which offer free automated scanning. Whether A11yScan's explicit accounting of unchecked items proves a meaningful distinction in practice would depend on how thoroughly it documents those gaps and how its detection coverage compares — neither of which is quantified in the available source material. No roadmap, expansion plans, or future feature disclosures appear in the submission.