The bench
No website builder can make your site accessible
What a platform hands you is real and measurable. What it cannot hand you is a compliant website, because the content decides that — and so this site measures the first thing and refuses to pretend about the second.
- A: Black text on white19.68:1Clears 7:1 (AAA text)
- B: Black text on the yellow13.75:1Clears 7:1 (AAA text)
- C: Yellow text on white · measured, then rejected1.43:1Fails every floor
Three questions, kept apart
Accessibility, overlay widgets and cookie consent get bundled together by vendors selling a single button that claims to settle all three. They are separate problems with separate evidence, so they have separate pages here.
PillarThe builders
Five platforms read for one thing: how much accessible ground each hands you before the work starts. Ranked by headroom, not by a compliance claim nobody can make.
PillarOverlays
A widget that promises compliance in a line of JavaScript. What the evidence says, what a regulator found, and why there is no partner link anywhere on that page.
PillarConsent banners
A different law and a different problem, filed separately on purpose. What Wix, Squarespace and Shopify actually give you, and where a banner stops being enough.
Latest from the bench
Every finding
Finding 0112 Sep 2026Conformance Reports and VPATs: Reading the Document, Not the Badge
A vendor sends you an accessibility conformance report. It is forty pages long and it is not a certificate. Here is how to read one, and which column tells you the truth.
Finding 028 Sep 2026Writing an Accessibility Statement That Is Not a Fiction
Most accessibility statements are copied from a generator, claim conformance nobody measured, and give the reader no way to get help. Here is what an honest one contains.
Finding 032 Sep 2026Forms That Fail: Labels, Errors and the Placeholder Problem
Missing form input labels were detected on 51% of the top million home pages. On a small business site the form is usually the only thing that earns money, which makes this the expensive failure.
Finding 0424 Aug 2026Webflow Accessibility: Maximum Control, Maximum Responsibility
Webflow hands you the markup, a contrast checker where the colour decision happens, and an audit panel. It also hands you every structural mistake a hand-coded site can make.
Finding 0517 Aug 2026Squarespace Accessibility: Strong Defaults, No Scanner
Squarespace inherits you a skip link and a visible focus outline without being asked, which is more than most platforms manage. Then it leaves you to find every problem yourself.
Finding 0610 Aug 2026The Wix Accessibility Wizard: What It Finds and What It Cannot
Wix is one of two builders here with an accessibility scanner built into the editor. It raises the floor considerably. Wix is also clear that it does not settle anything.
Why this site exists
The phrase "accessible website builder" gets used to sell a feeling. The feeling is that accessibility is a product decision — pick the right platform, tick the right box, and the problem is handled by somebody whose job it is.
It is not a product decision. A builder supplies an editor, a theme system and a rendering engine. The alternative text, the heading order, the contrast, the form labels, the captions, the link text: those come from you, and they are what decide whether your site works for the people standards exist to protect. The WebAIM Million's 2026 analysis detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of the top million home pages, at an average of 56.1 errors each.
So the work here is narrower and more useful. We read what each platform genuinely gives you — what we call headroom — and we are specific about what stays yours no matter which one you pick.
What you will not find here
No page on this site tells you that you will be compliant. Compliance is a legal determination about a particular site, against a particular obligation, in a particular jurisdiction, and it is not something any of us can hand you from a distance. Nothing here is legal advice.
You will also not find a partner link to an accessibility overlay. The assessment of overlay widgets on this site is unsparing, and it would be worth nothing if we were paid when somebody bought one. No overlay vendor exists anywhere in this site's affiliate configuration, which means there is no route by which one could be linked by accident.
And you will not find invented numbers. Every fragile figure that appears anywhere on this site — every date, every regulator's finding, every success criterion number — is listed in the repository with a source and the day it was checked, along with a list of the things we went looking for and could not stand behind.
The site is its own argument
This one is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly. Every colour pair used in this design was measured against WCAG 2.2 SC 1.4.6, the enhanced contrast criterion at Level AAA, which asks 7:1 for body text and 4.5:1 for large text — rather than against the 4.5:1 and 3:1 of the Level AA criterion most sites aim at. Body text here runs at 19.68:1. Black on the yellow bands runs at 13.75:1.
Three obvious uses of a yellow were measured and thrown out, which is why the yellow on this site is only ever a background and never type: yellow text on white measured 1.43:1, white text on yellow measured the same, and a darkened yellow hairline rule on white came in at 1.87:1. The working is checked into the repository as a script rather than asserted in a badge.
Try the site with a keyboard. Every interactive element takes a four-pixel focus ring with a three-pixel offset, the skip link lands as a full yellow slab instead of hiding in a corner, and nothing on this site is distinguished by colour alone.
In use
- Black text on white19.68:1
- Black text on the yellow13.75:1
Measured, then thrown out
- Yellow text on white1.43:1
- White text on yellow1.43:1
- Darkened yellow rule on white1.87:1
Start here
If you have never checked a site before, start with the keyboard test — it costs twenty minutes, needs nothing installed, and finds more than most scans. If you are choosing a platform, the builder assessments read five of them side by side. If somebody has sold you a widget, the overlay page has the record on it. And if you want to know how any of this was arrived at, how we audit has the method, the limits and the things we deliberately do not do.
The recheck notice
When a platform quietly changes what it gives you
Builders move accessibility features without a changelog: a theme restyles its focus ring, a wizard learns a check, a field migrates to another panel. The recheck list is meant to carry one short note whenever a page here has to be corrected. It is not switched on yet, so this form keeps nothing — until it is, the re-measured date at the foot of each page is the record.