Vesper Audit

Why It Exists

Automated accessibility checkers find a useful fraction of what actually stops someone using a website. They are good at contrast ratios and missing labels. They cannot tell you that the focus order jumps to the footer halfway through a form, or that a control announces itself as a link when it behaves like a button.

The gap between what a scanner reports and what a person experiences is where accessibility work actually lives. Closing it by hand across a few hundred pages is not a checklist problem. It needed a tool.

What It Does

Vesper Audit is a desktop application that crawls a site, runs the automated checks inside a real browser engine, and adds the measurements a rule engine cannot make on its own: how links are distinguished without relying on color, which form fields declare their purpose, whether an accessibility overlay has been installed over the top of the problem instead of fixing it.

The Report Is the Product

The scan is the easy half. What a client receives is a document someone non-technical can act on: what is wrong, where it is, why it matters, and what to do about it, in plain language, exported to whatever format the team already works in.

Every finding names the specific element and the specific criterion. A report that says a site has one hundred and forty issues is not useful. A report that says which heading, on which page, and what to change, is.

What Building It Taught Us

Writing a tool that finds defects in other people's sites is a strange way to learn design, and it is the most useful thing we have. You stop guessing about what breaks because you spend your week looking at it.

It also enforces a certain honesty. Several times the tool has reported a fault in our own work, and there is no arguing with your own scanner. That is roughly the point.

Why It Matters to a Client

Most agencies say their sites are accessible. Very few can hand you the evidence. When we say it, the report exists, the criteria are named, and you can check the work.

That is the whole reason this project sits in a portfolio of client work rather than in a separate products page. It is not a side interest. It is the thing that makes the rest of the claims checkable.