How do I check my website's accessibility without hiring an expert?

If your site is hosted with bernard, ask the AI you already use — ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — to run an accessibility check. It reads every page and also loads your busiest pages in a real phone-sized browser, so it measures what visitors actually see, not just what the code says.

Does accessibility really matter if my visitors seem fine?

Yes — around one in five people has some impairment that makes a low-contrast button or a vague link genuinely hard to use, and many more are squinting at a phone in sunlight. Search engines and AI assistants also treat a well-built, readable site as a sign it's worth recommending.

Will the fixes change how my site looks?

Mostly they're invisible — image descriptions and heading structure don't change the design at all. Where a colour genuinely needs nudging for contrast, you'll see exactly what changed on a preview first, and nothing goes live until you press Approve.

Is my site easy for everyone to use?

An accessible site is simply one that everyone can actually use — someone with tired eyes, someone on a bright bus with a cracked phone screen, someone using a screen reader. Most accessibility problems are small and invisible to the person who built the site, which is why they survive for years. On a bernard-hosted site, finding them is one ask.

What bernard checks

Two kinds of check happen in one pass:

Every page gets read for the structural things: images with no description, headings that skip levels, buttons and links with no name a screen reader can announce, and form fields with no label.
Your busiest pages get properly rendered — loaded in a real browser at phone size — so bernard can measure the things code alone can't tell you: whether the text colour genuinely reads against the background it sits on, and whether buttons and links are big enough to tap with a thumb (around 44 pixels is the accepted minimum).

That rendered check is what makes it trustworthy. A stylesheet can say the text is dark grey; only rendering the page shows what colour it ends up once backgrounds, images and overlays have their say.

Why it's worth doing

The obvious reason: more of your visitors can read, tap and buy. The quieter reason: search engines and AI assistants weigh how well-built a site is when deciding what to recommend, and the same things that help a person with low vision — clear headings, described images, readable text — are exactly what helps a machine understand you. See Write good alt text for my images for the image side, and Check my site works on a phone for the habit that catches half of this early.

How it works

Connect bernard to your AI (once). Log in to bernard, open your site, go to Use your own AI, and paste the setup prompt into your AI to connect it — a one-time setup.
Paste it into your AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you already use — then ask for an accessibility check using the prompt above. It reports what it finds, page by page, without changing anything.
Pick and approve. Tell it which problems to fix. The fixes land on a draft with a preview link — check it, press Approve, and it's live.

This sits naturally inside a broader Give my site a health check — ask for both together if it's been a while.

The prompt

“Check my site for accessibility problems — text that's hard to read against its background, buttons too small to tap on a phone, muddled headings, and images with no description. Report what you find first — don't change anything until I choose what to fix.”

The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.

Questions people ask

How do I check my website's accessibility without hiring an expert?: If your site is hosted with bernard, ask the AI you already use — ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — to run an accessibility check. It reads every page and also loads your busiest pages in a real phone-sized browser, so it measures what visitors actually see, not just what the code says.
Does accessibility really matter if my visitors seem fine?: Yes — around one in five people has some impairment that makes a low-contrast button or a vague link genuinely hard to use, and many more are squinting at a phone in sunlight. Search engines and AI assistants also treat a well-built, readable site as a sign it's worth recommending.
Will the fixes change how my site looks?: Mostly they're invisible — image descriptions and heading structure don't change the design at all. Where a colour genuinely needs nudging for contrast, you'll see exactly what changed on a preview first, and nothing goes live until you press Approve.