About Clear-Cut

Clear-Cut is a free service that scans websites for common accessibility issues and shows how accessible these sites are compared to similar organizations' websites in the same industry and location.

Most of the tests that Clear-Cut runs are part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an international standard that underpins many different digital accessibility laws, like:

• Section 508
• Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title II
• Oklahoma Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility (EITA)

Internally, Clear-Cut uses axe-core, “the world’s most popular accessibility testing library.” Axe is used by companies like Google and Microsoft to power some of their accessibility projects.

Why did you name this site “Clear-Cut”?

There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding digital accessibility. Web developers and digital marketing teams may lack experience in knowing what works and doesn’t work for people with disabilities.

Clear-Cut is designed to make it

• Obvious how your site is doing compared to other similar organizations.
• Simple to see the most obvious accessibility issues and fix them yourself (or with help )

To be honest, we also named it “clear-cut” because we’re using Axe on a whole lot of things at once.

How does it work?

1. Clear-Cut “crawls” your website: It opens your front page, finds links to other pages, uses those pages to find links to other pages, and so on. It stops when it hits a limit (usually 20-25 pages). Links in your top menu or footer menu are given top priority.
2. Behind the scenes, Clear-Cut opens up a web browser (a “headless” version of Google Chrome) and runs code from axe-core that checks your list of pages for common accessibility issues.
3. Clear-Cut creates report pages from the test results and formats the information so it’s easy to use.
4. Clear-Cut takes the accessibility scanning results from lots of different sites and creates a “leaderboard” list of those organizations, ranked by how many issues are detected.