You’ve just launched it. That beautiful, sleek website you and your team poured your hearts into. The design is pixel-perfect. The code is clean. The animations are buttery smooth.
You sit back, proud—and wait for the world to come knocking.
But what if, for a significant part of the world, your masterpiece is unusable?
- For someone who can’t see, maybe your site is a maze of unlabeled buttons and silent images.
- For someone with color blindness, your carefully chosen brand palette might turn text into camouflage.
- For someone who can’t use a mouse, your site may be like an escape room—with no way out.
We don’t mean to exclude anyone. But we often build for people like ourselves. That’s not malicious—it’s just a blind spot. We build a beautiful digital storefront, then forget the ramp to the front door.
It’s time to build digital ramps.
Your Friendly Accessibility Guide: Meet Axe-Core
The great news? You don’t need to be an accessibility expert to start fixing this. You just need the right tool to show you what you missed.
Enter Axe-Core
Axe-Core is like your free, lightning-fast accessibility consultant. It understands the official standards, checks your webpage instantly, and returns a clear report of where you might be excluding people—often without realizing it.
Here’s what it catches:
- Images without alt text: To a screen reader user, that image is just a blank space.
- Low contrast text: Vital for those with low vision or color blindness.
- Poorly labeled forms: Labels matter. Guessing shouldn’t be part of the UX.
- Icon-only buttons: What does a square with a slash even mean? Axe-Core will tell you.
It’s like a spellchecker—for human kindness.
Your Helpful Assistant: Python to Run the Show
Now you have an expert consultant. But how do you get it to scan every page of your site? Manually running tests is slow and error-prone.
Here’s where Python comes in.
With a few lines of code, Python can:
- Open a browser (automatically).
- Visit every page of your site.
- Run Axe-Core on each one.
- Collect the findings in a single report.
This turns a mountain of manual checking into a simple automated process.
Build Ramps During Construction—Not After
Finding issues is one thing. Preventing them is better.
In modern development, you probably already have automated tests that run every time new code is submitted—tests that check for bugs or deployment errors.
Why not check for accessibility too?
You can plug your Python + Axe-Core script into your CI/CD pipeline. If it finds a critical accessibility issue, it can block the release—just like it would for broken code.
It’s like a friendly inspector saying:
“This new feature is great, but let’s get the ramp installed before you open the door.”
That’s how accessibility becomes a team responsibility, not an afterthought.
Conclusion: It’s About People
Accessibility isn’t just about checking boxes or avoiding lawsuits. It’s about respect, dignity, and the belief that the web should be open to everyone.
By using tools like Axe-Core and Python, we can embed accessibility into the very foundation of how we build. It’s not harder. It’s just more thoughtful.
Let’s stop thinking of accessibility as a nice-to-have.
Let’s make it part of what it means for our work to be done.
Let’s build a web that welcomes everyone.
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