How to Check Your School Website for Accessibility Yourself

First, pick five pages

Your home page, your calendar or events page, your enrollment or registration page, one school building's page, and a page with board documents or other PDFs. Those five cover most of what families actually use.

Seven tests

1. Put the mouse away

Use only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. Can you always see where you are on the page? Can you reach every menu item and open every dropdown? Is there a "skip to content" link near the top? Do you ever get stuck? Many people with motor disabilities, and most screen reader users, navigate this way.

2. Zoom to 200 percent

Press Ctrl and plus (Cmd and plus on a Mac) until the browser says 200%. Text should still be readable, nothing should overlap, and you should not need to scroll sideways to read a paragraph.

3. Run a free automated checker

Install the free WAVE extension from WebAIM, or use Lighthouse in Chrome's developer tools (the Accessibility category). Run it on each of your five pages. Look for missing alt text, contrast errors, empty links and unlabeled form fields. Treat the results as a starting list, not a verdict.

4. Look at your images the way a screen reader does

WAVE shows each image's alt text. Check your event flyers especially: if the date, time and place exist only inside the picture, a screen reader user may never get them. Alt text should say what the image says and shows, not "flyer" or a camera filename.

5. Open five recent PDFs

Try to select a sentence of text. If you cannot, it is an image-only scan that a screen reader cannot read. In Adobe Acrobat Reader, File then Properties shows whether the document is tagged. More in our guide to which PDFs have to be accessible.

6. Watch one video with captions on

Are there captions at all? Are they accurate? Automatic captions often mangle names and school terms, and a board meeting with wrong captions is not much better than none.

7. Listen to your home page

NVDA is a free screen reader for Windows, and VoiceOver is built into every Mac and iPhone. In NVDA, press H to jump between headings and Insert+F7 to list every link. Does the outline make sense? Do the links make sense out of context, or is it "read more, read more, read more"?

What these checks will not tell you

Hand checks and free tools leave real gaps. They cannot tell you whether alt text that exists actually describes the image. Checkers read your page's code rather than what appears on screen, so they often miss text placed over photos. They rarely notice carousel slides that are hidden from view but still read aloud to screen reader users. And they only cover the pages you test, on the day you test them, while your site keeps changing and has far more than five pages.

That gap is what ADA Genie was built for: it crawls your site in a real browser, checks the PDFs your pages link to, measures contrast from the actual rendered pixels, flags questionable alt text for a person to review, and scans again as the site changes. You can see what that turns up across many sites in what we actually find on school websites.