Accessibility (A11y)
Accessibility is not a nice-to-have -- it is a requirement. It is legally mandated in many countries and benefits all users. arkmetis automatically checks your website against WCAG 2.1 and additionally offers a guided audit based on EN 301 549 / WCAG 2.2.
The A11y Dashboard
- A11y Score (0-100) – Average across all crawled pages
- Issue Overview – Critical issues, warnings, and notices
- Score Trend – Development over previous crawls
- Weakest Pages – The 10 pages with the lowest score
Choosing the WCAG Level
In the project settings, you choose your desired conformance level:
- AA (default) – The internationally recognized minimum standard
- AAA – The highest standard, often required for public institutions
With AAA, additional criteria are activated, such as stricter contrast requirements (7:1 instead of 4.5:1).
Filtering Issues by WCAG
Every issue found is mapped to a WCAG criterion (e.g. 1.1.1 Non-text Content, 2.4.1 Bypass Blocks). You can filter by:
- Severity – Critical, Warning, Notice
- WCAG Criterion – e.g. show only contrast issues
- Page – Issues for a single URL
Page Detail
Click on a page to see all A11y issues for that URL:
- Score for that specific page
- All issues grouped by WCAG criterion
- Severity badge for quick scanning
AI Fix Suggestions
Here is what makes arkmetis special: it groups your issues by type and generates concrete fix suggestions with code examples.
Instead of "Image has no alt text," you get:
<!-- Before -->
<img src="team.jpg">
<!-- After -->
<img src="team.jpg" alt="Our team at the 2025 annual celebration">
The AI understands your website's context, making its suggestions far more relevant than generic tools.
Common Issues
| Problem | Severity | WCAG | Solution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Missing alt attribute | Critical | 1.1.1 | Add alt text |
| Insufficient contrast | Critical | 1.4.3 | Adjust colors |
| Missing form labels | Critical | 1.3.1 | Link labels to inputs |
| Heading skip (h1→h4) | Warning | 1.3.1 | Fix heading hierarchy |
| Missing skip link | Warning | 2.4.1 | Add skip navigation |
| No visible focus ring | Warning | 2.4.7 | Do not remove outline |
Guided A11y Audit
For an in-depth review, arkmetis offers a guided audit based on EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.2 with approximately 97 check steps:
- Create audit – Select site, choose legal framework (WZG for Austria, BFSG for Germany, BehiG for Switzerland)
- Select pages – Suggested from sitemap, manually adjustable
- Automatic prefill – arkmetis maps existing A11y issues to check steps automatically (~40% are prefilled)
- Step-by-step review – Go through each of the 97 checks: Pass, Fail, Not Applicable
- AI assistance – For every check, you can ask Metis (the AI assistant), which analyzes the HTML code and suggests fixes
- Comments & screenshots – Document your findings per check
- Share report – Read-only link for clients, editable link for agencies (fix tracking)
- Re-audit – After fixes, start a diff audit that only re-checks changed items
Compliance Statements
arkmetis generates DACH-specific accessibility statements:
- Austria (WZG) – Web Accessibility Act
- Germany (BFSG) – Accessibility Strengthening Act
- Switzerland (BehiG) – Disability Equality Act
The statement is automatically populated from company data and audit results.
Page Browser
On the page detail view, you will find the Page Browser for quick navigation between pages – with prev/next buttons and keyboard shortcuts (Alt+← / Alt+→).