About Perceivable
A small, independent tool for checking whether a website meets the accessibility standard the European Accessibility Act points at.
Why “Perceivable”
- per·ceiv·a·ble
- 1.that can be seen, heard, or otherwise sensed.
- 2.WCAGthe first of four principles: information and interface components must be presented in ways that users can perceive, whichever sense they rely on.
Not a marketing word. The standard this site audits against is built on four principles — content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust — and we are named after the one at the front.
It is also the principle that fails most often. Across the sites scanned so far, the commonest finding by a wide margin is text too faint to read, followed by images a screen reader has nothing to say about. We check all four principles. We are named after the one that breaks first.
Why it exists
The EAA has applied since June 2025, and it caught a lot of ordinary businesses by surprise — companies that sell online, are well above the microenterprise threshold, and have no idea the obligation applies to them.
The tooling around this splits into two unhelpful halves. At one end, free single-page checkers that hand you raw rule identifiers and leave you to work out what they mean. At the other, enterprise platforms priced for organisations with a dedicated accessibility team. There was not much in the middle for a company with a website, no specialist, and a real obligation.
What we will not do
We will not sell you a compliance certificate. Automated testing covers roughly a third of WCAG. Any vendor implying a script makes you compliant is selling you a false sense of security that will not survive contact with a complaint.
We will not sell you an overlay. Accessibility overlay widgets do not fix the underlying code, are rejected by disability advocacy organisations, and have been present on sites that were sued anyway.
We will not publish your results. Reports are unlisted and excluded from search engines. Naming and shaming companies for traffic would be a straightforward way to build an audience and we are not doing it.