Our story — why we built AbleGuard.
I’m Syed Balkhi. I run Awesome Motive, the team behind WPBeginner, WPForms, OptinMonster and a handful of other WordPress products. Building them means we spend our days inside other people’s websites.
Accessibility kept turning up in those sites the same way: a widget in the corner, a badge in the footer, and markup underneath that no assistive technology could work with. The owner had paid for it, and believed they were covered.
The pitch was always a feeling
Install this, stop worrying. That is what most accessibility tools are really selling. The HTML underneath does not change, the next scanner finds the same failures, and the site owner only discovers the difference when somebody asks them to prove it.
For a long time I did not have a better answer to give people. That bothered me, because they were asking us.
The thing that changed my mind
In January 2025 the FTC fined the overlay vendor accessiBe one million dollars. That was not a surprise to anyone who had looked at what an overlay actually does — it rearranges what a sighted visitor sees and leaves the underlying page exactly as broken as it was. What struck me was how many site owners had no way of knowing that. They had bought the only answer being marketed to them.
So the question I started from was not “how do we score a site”. Plenty of tools already do that. It was: what would a product look like if it refused to sell comfort?
So we built it the other way round
Find the machine-detectable failures and describe them the way a person would. Fix the ones that can be fixed safely — attributes and CSS, never a layout rewrite — and apply them at the source where the platform allows it, so the corrected markup is what leaves the server. Then re-measure on the live page, because a fix you have not verified is a claim, not a repair.
And write everything down, with dates. The single most useful thing we can give someone is not a score. It is a record they can hand to whoever is asking.
What AbleGuard will not do
We will not tell you that you are compliant. There is no certification to hold, roughly a third of WCAG is human judgement, and any vendor promising otherwise is describing a product that does not exist.
We will not generate a “fully conformant” statement, however much better it would look on your site.
We will not report an improvement figure we cannot stand behind. If a re-check cannot finish, you see that it did not finish.
That costs us sales against competitors who promise protection outright. I think it is the only version of this product worth shipping.
This is the start, not the finish
AbleGuard is early. What has shipped is labelled as shipped and what is still on the roadmap is labelled as roadmap — on the docs page and the pricing page, not only here. My commitment is not that the product is finished. It is that we will never describe it as more finished than it is.