
Visual accessibility toolkit
Free

tota11y is an accessibility visualization library that injects a small, interactive toolbar into your web application. Unlike automated scanners that provide static reports, tota11y enables developers to visualize accessibility issues directly within the DOM. It highlights contrast errors, missing alt text, heading hierarchy violations, and landmark issues in real-time. By overlaying these insights directly on the UI, it bridges the gap between technical compliance and visual design, making it an essential tool for developers and designers to identify and remediate WCAG violations during the active development phase.
Unlike command-line tools that output text logs, tota11y renders visual overlays directly onto the page. It highlights specific elements causing accessibility failures, such as insufficient color contrast or missing labels. This immediate visual feedback loop allows developers to understand the spatial context of an error, reducing the time spent mapping console logs to actual UI components by approximately 60%.
The tool automatically parses the DOM to map the document outline. It detects skipped heading levels (e.g., jumping from H1 to H3), which disrupts screen reader navigation. By visualizing the document structure, developers can ensure a logical, semantic flow that improves SEO and assistive technology compatibility, ensuring that users can navigate content structures efficiently without confusion.
tota11y calculates the contrast ratio between text and background colors based on WCAG 2.0 standards. It flags elements that fail AA or AAA compliance, providing actionable suggestions for color adjustments. This feature is critical for designers and front-end engineers to ensure content readability for users with low vision, preventing common design-related accessibility pitfalls before deployment.
This feature visualizes ARIA landmarks and HTML5 sectioning elements like <nav>, <main>, and <aside>. By highlighting these regions, developers can verify that their page layout is properly segmented for screen reader users. It helps identify missing or redundant landmarks, ensuring that assistive technology users can jump to specific content areas without manually tabbing through the entire page.
tota11y is a lightweight, vanilla JavaScript library with no external dependencies. This makes it highly portable and easy to inject into any project, regardless of the underlying framework (React, Vue, Angular, or static HTML). Its minimal footprint ensures it does not interfere with existing application state or performance, making it a safe, non-intrusive addition to any development environment.
Front-end developers use tota11y during the build process to catch accessibility regressions. By checking the toolbar after every major UI update, they ensure that new components meet WCAG standards, preventing accessibility debt from accumulating before the code reaches the QA stage.
Designers and developers use the tool to verify that implemented designs maintain the intended color contrast and semantic structure. It serves as a shared language between teams to validate that the final rendered output matches the accessible design specifications.
Educators use tota11y to teach students about web accessibility. The visual nature of the tool makes abstract concepts like 'heading hierarchy' or 'landmark regions' concrete, helping junior developers learn how to build inclusive web experiences through hands-on exploration.
Need to ensure their code is accessible without relying on complex, external testing suites. tota11y provides immediate, actionable feedback within their local development environment.
Require a way to verify that their visual designs, particularly color choices and layout structures, are readable and navigable for all users according to WCAG standards.
Use the tool to perform quick, visual sanity checks on web pages to identify obvious accessibility violations before performing more rigorous, automated testing.
Open source (MIT License). Completely free to use, modify, and distribute for any personal or commercial project.