lukeduff.co.uk
Product Design & Build
The European Accessibility Act places a real legal obligation on many businesses to make their websites accessible and to publish a conformance statement. Most teams have no clear path from "we need to comply" to "we do comply." Existing tools tend to scan a single page, produce a wall of cryptic violations and leave legal and business stakeholders none the wiser.
A11y Shield is an in-progress product built to close that gap. The idea is a single automated loop: crawl the whole site, audit every page with a real accessibility engine, score the result against the EAA and EN 301 549 standard, generate the required statement, produce a fix plan the team can actually work through, and then keep watching. A one-time pass is not enough if the next deploy quietly breaks things again.
This is not a client project. It's a product Luke has designed and built himself, tested against its own engine down to zero violations across its own pages.
| Problem | Solution Implemented |
|---|---|
| Most accessibility checkers only look at one page, which misses most of a real site. | Built a crawler that walks the full site and audits every page using a real accessibility engine inside a headless browser, rolling all results into a single score. |
| A raw list of violations means nothing to a legal or business stakeholder. | Built a mapping layer that translates each technical violation into the matching standard clause, adds plain-English framing, a severity rating and an effort estimate. |
| A simple violation count is a poor measure: ten identical issues are not ten times worse than one. | Designed a scoring model that weights issues sensibly and produces a bounded, stable score rather than one that collapses to zero on a bad page. |
| Crawling user-supplied URLs is a serious security risk, particularly server-side request forgery via DNS rebinding. | Built a byte-level request guard that validates addresses before connection and pins each connection to the checked address, with a second network-level filter around the headless browser. |
| The compliance statement and fix plan are the deliverables clients actually need, not just a score. | The engine generates the accessibility statement as a hosted page and a PDF, alongside an exportable remediation plan listing every issue to fix. |
| A site can pass an audit once and then regress silently on the next deploy. | Added monitoring that re-checks on deploy and flags regressions, so maintaining compliance requires ongoing attention rather than a single run. |