It’s been a REALLY long while since I posted to this blog! I’ve been busy with work, family, a house extension, and plenty of side projects. This post is actually about one of those side projects.
I first learnt about web accessibility while I was working for the BBC around 2016. We ran user testing sessions to discover where the BBC News website had accessibility holes, and it was eye-opening to see the wide range of assistive technologies that people use to access the web. I spent several years making manual accessibility testing part of our teams’ daily workflow — tabbing through pages to test keyboard navigation, using screen readers on a range of devices, and trying out various browser extensions. Eventually the bbc-a11y project was born, and we started to move to more automated accessibility testing.
Fast forward a few years, and I was surprised to find that many automated accessibility testing tools are still… not very automated. They require a lot of manual setup, and they don’t integrate well with modern development workflows. Often these tools are still run as one-off tests, relying on developers to make the effort. The auditing itself was automated, but the process around it was still very manual.
Towards the end of 2019 I started to build a tool that made accessibility testing feel truly automated. This tool was called UserScope, and the now-abandoned code is still available on GitHub. The reason I abandoned this project was simply that I couldn’t justify paying for the infrastructure required to run it. I never really stopped thinking about UserScope, but I wasn’t able to take it any further until 2025 when I was talking about the project with a friend of mine, Andy Biggs. We agreed that there’s still a need for a fully automated accessibility testing tool, and it would be worth trying to build one as a SaaS product.
That brings us to October 2025, when we officially launched A11y Pulse.
Now it’s April 2026, and A11y Pulse is used by hundreds of teams around the world. Both Andy and I have full-time jobs, but we actively work on A11y Pulse in our spare time and have been able to ship a lot of new features over the last 7 months. We have an API, an MCP server, Slack integrations, and much more in the pipeline. The most recent feature launch is the Web Accessibility Scoreboard, which keeps track of popular websites and their accessibility scores. It’s been fascinating to find how many huge companies have very poor accessibility scores, and it’s been great to see the positive response from the web accessibility community.
Anyway, that’s the story of what I’ve been up to since my last post on here. If you’re interested in web accessibility, or if you’re looking for a way to automate your accessibility testing, please check out A11y Pulse! We genuinely believe it’s the best tool out there for automated accessibility testing, because we actually use it on a daily basis and integrate it into our development workflow.