Comparison
Accessibility auditvsScreen reader
Accessibility audit
the automated check found the missing labels and the contrast failures, and nothing about whether the flow made sense.
An automated scan of rendered output against machine-checkable accessibility rules, runnable in a component test or a browser test. It reliably catches missing names, bad contrast, invalid ARIA and duplicate ids, which is a meaningful share of real defects. It cannot judge focus order, announcement quality or whether an interaction is usable, so it narrows manual testing rather than replacing it.
Full entry →Screen reader
you turned one on and heard your interface read out as a flat sequence with no structure at all.
Software that presents the accessibility tree as speech or braille and provides its own navigation over headings, landmarks and controls. Behaviour varies meaningfully between combinations of reader and browser, so 'works in VoiceOver' is not the same as 'accessible'. Nothing substitutes for listening to your own page once, which is usually a short and educational experience.
Full entry →