Kithe

Free scan · no account · nothing installed

Check a site for accessibility problems

Type a web address. Kithe reads up to 3 pages and lists what it finds, with the fix for each. No account, and nothing installed on your site.

Kithe reports findings for a person to read and decide about. It is not a compliance certificate, and it does not say that a site passes anything.

Specimen — an example, not a result

01

High

Likely blocking

Image has no alt attribute

A screen reader has nothing to announce here, so the image is skipped or its file name is read out instead.

The markup as it stands

<img src="/photos/storefront.jpg" width="960">
Where
example.ca — main > article > img (2nd of 6)
WCAG
1.1.1 Non-text Content (A)
Check
img-alt-missing

The scan

Run a scan

Any page will do. You can leave off the https:// — example.ca and https://example.ca/about both work.

Nothing is installed on your site: no script tag, no plugin, no code, and no account for this scan. Kithe fetches up to 3 pages the way any visitor would, reads the markup, and shows you what it found.

Method

What happens when you press the button

  1. 01

    Kithe reads robots.txt and obeys it. Any path the file disallows is skipped, not fetched.

  2. 02

    It follows the links on that page to decide what else to read — never onto another host, and never more pages than your plan allows.

  3. 03

    Each page is fetched once, one after another, as an ordinary visitor would. Your JavaScript is not run, nothing is submitted, and no form is filled in.

  4. 04

    The mechanical rules run over the markup: alt text, form labels, page title and language, heading order, link text, tables, frames, button names, duplicate ids, and the colour contrast that can be measured from the page.

  5. 05

    You get the findings grouped by page, each with where it is, the markup as it stands, and what to do about it. Nothing on your site is changed.

Limits

What this report is, and what it is not

Findings for a person to read and decide about — not a compliance certificate.

A machine catches the barriers that can be measured in markup. Whether the alt text describes the right thing, whether a page reads sensibly in order, whether a form can be finished in a hurry — those need a person.

Any wording Kithe suggests is a draft. Nothing is applied to your site, because Kithe cannot write to it.

The name is short for Know Issues That Hurt, every day, and Kithe is an old word meaning to make known.

Next

Watch the site instead of checking it once

A site does not hold still. Publish a post, change a theme, and something that was fine last week is not. With an account every scan is compared with the one before it, so you see what is new and what you have fixed.

An account also raises how much gets read. This page reads three pages; a free account reads 25, and the paid plans go further. Still nothing installed on your site.

Create an accountSee what the plans cost

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