This feels like it should be a more concrete service, with a focus on actually interacting with the testers. Maybe this exists already, but my limited experiences have been using "accessibility certification" services where you submit a site, and days or weeks later get back a huge list of stuff to "fix" without any real guidance or ability to even check "is this what you meant?" before resubmitting and waiting for days/weeks again. It's the opposite of 'fast feedback' and 'talking to end users' - slow feedback mediated through a service preventing any interaction with the actual testers.

That is pretty much my dayjob :P Although I'm also a developer myself so can argue from both the blind person's view of "This button doesn't tell my screen reader what it's meant to accomplish", as well as the developer's point of view of " You simply forgot to add an accessible label, don't you dare tell me you don't have capacity to fix something that'd take 10 seconds to fix". ;)

I had a couple of such sessions as part of accessibility certification when rebuilding a largish government website years back. It's definitely worth it for understanding the why of the accessibility recommendations, rather than just following a checklist. And if budget allows to do website improvements that go beyond.

The experience was also humbling in an awesome way. I think I still haven't seen anyone navigate the web as fast as this one blind person was capable of, due to the mastery of his tools.

There definitely are accessibility testers who do this kind of thing professionally. The latest episode of the Linux After Dark podcast [1] had Florian Beijers [2] as a guest who livestreams accessibility testing of open source projects and does professional accessibility consulting.

[1] https://linuxafterdark.net/linux-after-dark-episode-72/ [2] https://florianbeijers.xyz/

Let me preface with: I’m neither a web dev nor experienced with accessibility.

Which tools did you use? I’d argue a human probably also won’t review all your alt tags manually or you could just do it yourself, too. If you have lots of them it might make sense to extract them automatically and pipe them to some language model to generate a score for each of them. Then you can review the ones with the worst scores.

It seems to me that https://wave.webaim.org/ does a good job with ensuring contrast is good, etc., as once I followed all the recommendations things are also readable when using Dev Tools to simulate various vision deficiencies.

It's a great idea to be proactive in this area, but always make it easy for your users to report problems. People with different conditions, whether classified as disabilities or not, have varying capabilities. You might be surprised by the issues people encounter with your product, even if you follow all guidelines meaningfully (so not just with placeholders like alt="image" - yes, even then).

Source: I've been part of an accessibility taskforce at my company for a long time.

There are people in Fiverr who specialise in it. (But a lot of them will just run basic tools, so watch out) A shout-out on mastodon may give you some good leads too.

> I'd love to pay like a $100 to a person with disabilities to use my website for a couple of hours and shit on the experience.

Meta comment, but this made me smile. I love the vivid expression, the raw humility, and the philosophically deep but humorous and light hearted commentary on how it feels to have your code evaluated :-)