What WAVE does well
- Excellent for learning — you see the issue on the element that causes it
- Reveals structure: headings, landmarks, reading order, contrast
- From WebAIM, one of the most trusted names in accessibility
- No signup for single-page checks
Where WAVE falls short
Every accessibility vendor has a target customer and a target solution. WAVE's shape works for some teams and badly for others. The points below come up most often when buyers move off WAVE and what they wish they had asked sooner.
- One page at a time — impractical for a site of any size
- Reports what is wrong, not the corrected markup
- No monitoring, no history, no regression detection
- Extension checks the DOM in your browser, so results depend on your session state
Why teams pick Certvo instead
- Crawls the whole site instead of one URL at a time
- Generates the fix as code, not just an annotation
- Scheduled re-scans catch regressions after a release
- Compliance artefacts: statement generator, VPAT, exportable reports
Try a free public scan on the same URL you would test with WAVE. Compare what each tool says is wrong and how each proposes to fix it.
When you should still pick the other tool
Bluntly: if the only thing you need is a visible widget on your site (e.g. as part of a settlement consent decree that names a specific overlay product), an overlay vendor is the path of least resistance. Certvo does not ship a widget. We give you patches; the widget is only a UI for the audit.
If you have an enterprise procurement process that already has a long-running contract with a competitor and the buying motion would take six months to switch, you can use Certvo alongside as the audit-and-fix tool while the widget keeps sitting on the page.
Frequently asked questions
Is WAVE more accurate than an automated scanner?
It is not a question of accuracy — WAVE is also automated, and it surfaces the same class of machine-detectable issues. The difference is presentation and scale. WAVE excels at showing you an issue in visual context on one page, which is why it is such a good teaching tool. A crawler excels at telling you that the same component fails on 340 pages. Most teams want both: WAVE while debugging a specific template, a crawl to know the blast radius.
Can WAVE check pages behind a login?
The browser extension can, because it evaluates whatever is rendered in your authenticated session — that is one of its real advantages over the public web version. The trade-off is that results depend on your session, so they are hard to reproduce or share as evidence.
Does WAVE cover WCAG 2.2?
WAVE reports against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 criteria, like other current tools, but as with any automated checker it covers only the machine-decidable subset. The newer 2.2 criteria such as focus appearance and dragging movements are largely judgement calls, so no tool including ours can confirm them without a person.