WAVE (by WebAIM) shows accessibility problems where they live: icons are injected directly onto your rendered page, so a missing alt attribute points at the image that lacks it and a contrast failure highlights the exact text. For visual people reviewing generated code, it beats a console list of violations.
Where it shines
- Errors with coordinates. The overlay makes fixes obvious even if you’ve never read WCAG - the red icon sits on the offending element.
- Structure view. Headings, landmarks and tab order rendered as an outline, exposing the semantic skeletons AI-generated markup often forgets.
- Contrast tooling. It computes contrast ratios and suggests the nearest passing color - the most common generated-UI failure, solved in one click.
Where it falls short
- Automated tools catch perhaps half of accessibility issues; keyboard flows, focus management and screen-reader semantics still need human testing.
- The browser extension is the comfortable way in, which means adding one more extension.
The real cost
Free. WAVE only asks that you fix what it finds before calling the page “accessible”.
Verdict
The fastest accessibility first pass. Run it on every generated page: two minutes of overlay review catches the failures users with disabilities hit first.
