Accessibility Insights: Microsoft’s free tool for auditing website accessibility

Once the extension is installed, clicking its icon opens a launch menu with four options. FastPass is the quick check: a series of automated checks, about fifty requirements evaluated by axe-core, the open source engine from Deque Systems, followed by an assisted keyboard navigation test that draws the path of the Tab key on the page to reveal unreachable elements, traps and illogical focus order. Cases the automated engine can’t decide, such as text placed over an image, are set aside for a human to judge. Quick Assess adds about ten key requirements, and the Assessment runs 24 tests covering the WCAG 2.2 Level AA success criteria: some are automated, the rest are manual, with instructions and often a visual aid. Your work can be saved and picked up later, exported as an HTML or JSON report, and each issue can be turned into a GitHub or Azure Boards ticket.

The fourth option, “Ad hoc tools,” works outside any assessment: it overlays the page with your choice of heading structure, regions, ARIA landmarks, tab order or the results of the color checks, much like WAVE’s icons.

Alongside the extension, Microsoft distributes a Windows app that applies the same approach to desktop software: inspecting the accessibility properties of each control, automated checks, tab stop testing and a contrast analyzer. A third version, for Android, was retired in 2023 for lack of users.

Accessibility Insights is published by Microsoft, which open-sourced it in March 2019. The tools have relied on Deque’s axe technology from the start, Deque contributed to the project, and Microsoft in turn contributed its Windows rules engine to the axe project. The code is published on GitHub under the MIT license, and the extension still gets updates as new versions of axe-core come out, although they have become irregular, sometimes with several months between releases.