DSGN Accessibility Audit and Statement

DSGN Accessibility Audit and Statement is an honest accessibility tool by DSGN. It does three things, well:

1. Audits your site with a server-side analyzer and shows, in a clean dashboard, which WCAG 2.1 AA criteria are not met.
2. Gives visitors a panel with preferences the site genuinely honours: text size and spacing, link highlighting, high contrast, negative colours, pausing motion, reducing animations, disabling autoplay audio and video, read-aloud (browser speech), a visible keyboard focus and a bigger cursor.
3. Generates the Accessibility Statement and provides a feedback mechanism to report barriers — both required under the European Accessibility Act.

Available in English and Italian (full translation included).

What this plugin does NOT do (by design)

It is not an overlay. It does not alter your site to pretend it is accessible, and it never declares a conformance you do not have. Accessibility is achieved by building the site correctly: the tool helps you see what to fix and document the status, not hide it.

Automated analysis only covers part of the WCAG criteria. The rest — focus order, keyboard navigation, alternative-text quality, reading order — require human review. The plugin says so clearly instead of masking it.

The controls and the WCAG criteria they map to

• Text size — 1.4.4 Resize Text
• Text spacing — 1.4.12 Text Spacing
• Highlight links — 1.4.1 Use of Color
• Pause motion — 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide
• Reduce animations — prefers-reduced-motion
• Disable autoplay audio/video — 1.4.2 Audio Control

Scanning: server-side, runs anywhere

The default static engine runs on the server: it fetches your pages and analyses the markup (alt text, form labels, link and button names, page language, document title, blocked zoom, empty headings, duplicate ids, untitled frames). No browser, no JavaScript execution — it works on any host, on demand or on a weekly schedule.

Colour contrast (1.4.3) and JavaScript-rendered content cannot be evaluated from markup alone. The browser engine covers them: it runs axe-core in your own browser, on demand, when you press Run scan. Your browser is the rendering engine, so colour contrast and the post-JavaScript DOM are included. Nothing leaves your site.

axe-core (MPL-2.0) is bundled and loaded only in the admin, only when the browser engine is selected.

The on-site visitor panel is branded Threshold by DSGN — https://dsgngroup.it