How I Built a Free Accessibility Scanner with Next.js, Puppeteer, and axe-core

ADA website lawsuits are at an all time high. Pro se filings are surging because AI tools make it easier to file without a lawyer. Settlements range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to well over fifty thousand. The tools that exist to help? Enterprise scanners cost a fortune per year. Overlay widgets like accessiBe just got hit with an FTC settlement. Free developer tools like WAVE speak in technical jargon that a small business owner will never understand. I built accessscan.pro to fill the gap: an affordable, honest accessibility scanner that speaks plain language. Here's how. The Architecture User enters a URL, which hits the scan API. It checks the rate limit through Upstash Redis, validates the URL with SSRF prevention, launches headless Chromium using puppeteer-core and @sparticuz/chromium-min, navigates to the page, injects axe-core from CDN, runs the accessibility analysis, calculates a compliance score, translates violations into plain language, stores the results in Supab