Automated accessibility testing

The use of software tools to automatically evaluate digital content against accessibility standards, checking for issues like missing alt text, colour contrast violations, missing form labels, untagged PDF structure, and incorrect heading hierarchy. Automated testing can efficiently identify many common accessibility failures at scale, but has significant limitations — it typically catches only 30-50% of accessibility issues and cannot evaluate subjective quality (e.g., whether alt text is meaningful or a heading hierarchy is logical). Effective accessibility evaluation combines automated testing with manual expert review and user testing with assistive technology users.