// Letters — No. 004 — — Seattle — 2 min read
Why I brought Auditvia back
In 2025 I built Auditvia to fix accessibility in the code. On 2 October it came back as something smaller, a free audit any founder can run on their homepage in about a minute.
I built Auditvia in 2025 as an accessibility tool for developers. It scanned a site’s code, opened pull requests that fixed problems at the source, and kept audit logs. I wrote about why in No. 001: overlays had sold owners a feeling of compliance while the sites underneath stayed broken. Later the product was shut down.
On 2 October I brought it back, owned by my studio and much smaller than before. It’s a free audit. You paste your homepage address, and in about a minute you get scores for accessibility, SEO, speed, AI search, and your message and copy, with the fixes ranked by how much they matter. There’s no email gate and no account.
Why a free audit
Before reviving it we went through 246 Hacker News comments from site owners since 2024 and kept the 41 that described a real problem. Fifteen came from people who don’t trust website tools at all. One described scan reports as “massive PDF reports that sat in a shared drive collecting dust.” Others wrote about accessibility lawsuits rising, about vendors emailing before a suit had even been served, and about overlays as fake compliance. Nineteen were about AI search: organic traffic down, click-through rates collapsing, and nobody wanting to bounce between ten checklists to find out why.
So the new Auditvia tries hard not to be a PDF in a shared drive. It shows the evidence behind each check, ranks what to fix, and marks each fix as something you can do yourself or something worth handing to a specialist.
How it works
Most of it runs on our own engine. It reads your homepage, the files it loads, your robots.txt and your sitemap, then runs 12 accessibility rules, 12 SEO rules and 10 speed rules in about a second. Google’s Lighthouse runs alongside as a cross-check, because it can see two things raw HTML can’t, colour contrast and how quickly the page paints, but it doesn’t set the score.
The AI search checks are simple ones: whether you block AI crawlers, whether you have an llms.txt file, whether your structured data says who you are. The message score uses the same twelve-question scorecard my studio uses with clients, and each opening sentence on your page gets marked as specific, vague or empty marketing.
What it won’t do
It won’t make your site ADA compliant, and no automated tool can. Automated checks cover part of WCAG. The rest needs a person testing with a keyboard and a screen reader, and I’d rather say so on the page than sell anyone a widget.
We keep your URL and its scores for 24 hours. If you run it on your site, I’d like to hear what it got wrong.