About Inspector
Daniel Kosbab, Marije Koopmeiners, and DeepSpectrum · July 2026
Accessibility Inspector is a tool from the Accessibility Research Lab DeepSpectrum. We systematically study where and why accessibility actually breaks on real, modern web apps - in production systems with routing, dynamic states, and constantly changing components, not just in theory.
Accessibility Inspector comes out of that research: continuous accessibility testing that a team can actually keep up with, instead of an audit that goes stale the day after it's delivered. We funded the lab's first year ourselves, so we can build what our research actually shows, not what an investor's roadmap says. The outcome is still uncertain, but we think the problem is worth working on properly.
Background
Most accessibility reviews still run the way they did a decade ago: a review runs once, against a handful of pages, while the app keeps shipping in between. That's the pattern we wanted to understand before we started building a tool against it.
Most automated scanners were also built for the web as it looked before single-page apps: they check the first render, not the routes, modals, and dynamic states people actually reach. That exact gap - between what gets tested and what people actually use - is the starting point of our research at DeepSpectrum.
Our approach
Accessibility Inspector isn't a simple wrapper around axe-core or similar checks. We test at the component level, so a finding in the design system is found once and fixed at the source - not separately on every single page the component appears on. And we test multi-step user flows like checkout or onboarding as connected sequences, not isolated pages.
Every finding maps to a real WCAG success criterion, and every report to the standard someone actually asked for - EN 301 549, Section 508, VPAT. We don't pretend automation replaces judgment: no tool can fully guarantee conformance on its own, which is why structured manual review sits alongside the automated scans, not as an afterthought.
Looking forward
With the European Accessibility Act, many companies have had to make their digital products verifiably accessible since mid-2025 - not just aim for it. We expect enforcement and the depth of scrutiny to keep increasing over the coming years, and we'd rather build toward that level now than catch up to it later.
DeepSpectrum
DeepSpectrum was founded by Daniel Kosbab and Marije Koopmeiners, who met at VU Amsterdam. We funded the lab's first year ourselves, with €15,000 out of pocket, so our research wouldn't depend on an investor's interests. The same independence applies to the product: no cookies or tracking scripts collecting data we don't need, and no claims we can't back up - including about our own launch timeline, which we genuinely don't know yet.
Say hello
Accessibility Inspector is currently a research preview. If it sounds useful, join the waitlist - we'll let you know as soon as you can sign up.