DEV Community: Richard Huang

Day 3: 60+ cold DMs, 2 replies, 0 paying customers and here's what I'm learning

Richard Huang — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:23:37 +0000

I'm building an accessibility scanner that finds WCAG 2.2 violations and generates AI code fixes for each one. No overlay widgets, no expensive consultants — just the specific code changes your site needs.

To get my first customers, I've been scanning UK web agency websites and DMing the founders with their specific violation data. Not "hey I built a cool tool" but their actual problems on their actual site.

Here's what 3 days of cold outreach looks like with zero budget:
60+ personalised DMs sent. Every single one includes a scan of the founder's own website — violation count, severity, specific issues like "26 images missing alt text" or "47 elements failing colour contrast."

2 replies. One "not interested." One CEO seemed interested so we will see how that goes.
0 paying customers.

What I've learned so far:
"I found 7 violations on your site, got the report with code fixes, want it?" converts way better than "I built a tool, try it yourself at mysite.com." The first version gives them a reason to reply. The second asks them to do work.
Scanning recognisable brands and publishing the results is the best free marketing I've found. My post scanning 5 major UK brands got 10x the engagement of anything else I've written.
The AI-generated code fix is the real differentiator. Every serious scanner already surfaces violations. Nobody else closes the loop with "here's the exact code change." That's the expensive part of any remediation engagement and that's what people are willing to pay for.

Clutch.co is almost useless for sourcing UK agencies — it recycles the same companies across every city filter. Switching to LinkedIn search for "web design agency founder" filtered by UK was 10x more efficient for finding real people to contact.

Free to try: viascan.dev
If you're doing cold outreach with zero budget I'd love to hear what's working for you.

I scanned 10 UK web agency websites for WCAG 2.2 violations — here's what I found

Richard Huang — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:09:03 +0000

I'm 15, and I recently built an accessibility scanner that checks websites against WCAG 2.2 standards. To stress-test it, I decided to scan the websites of 10 UK web development agencies — the companies that build websites for a living.

The setup

I ran a single-page scan (homepage only) on each agency's site using axe-core, checking against 90+ WCAG 2.2 rules. No full crawls — just the home page.

The results were as follows:

Agency A: 8 violations (2 critical, 5 serious)
Agency B: 8 violations (2 critical, 3 serious)
Agency C: 8 violations (1 critical, 2 serious)
Agency D: 7 violations (2 critical, 2 serious)
Agency E: 5 violations (2 critical, 2 serious)
Agency F: 5 violations (0 critical, 1 serious)
Agency G: 4 violations (0 critical, 1 serious)
Agency H: 4 violations (0 critical, 1 serious)
Agency I: 2 violations (0 critical, 1 serious)
Agency J: 0 violations — clean pass

9 out of 10 failed. Only one agency had a completely clean homepage.

Totals across all 10 sites:

51 violations
9 critical
18 serious
21 moderate
3 minor

The most common violations
Colour contrast failures — showed up on 5 out of 10 sites. Text that doesn't meet the minimum contrast ratio against its background. This is the single most common accessibility issue on the web, and agencies are no exception.
Links without discernible text — 5 out of 10 sites. Screen readers can't tell users where a link goes if it has no accessible name. Usually caused by icon links or image links with no alt text.
Missing lang attribute — 2 out of 10 sites didn't declare a language on their HTML element. This tells screen readers which language to use for pronunciation. Takes 10 seconds to fix.
Zooming disabled — 2 out of 10 sites used meta viewport settings that prevent users from zooming in. This is a critical violation because it blocks people with low vision from enlarging text.
Images without alt text — one agency had 272 images on their homepage with no alt text. Two hundred and seventy-two.

Why this matters

These are the companies businesses hire to build their websites. If their own sites don't pass basic accessibility checks, what does that say about the sites they're building for clients?

This isn't about shaming anyone — most of these are easy fixes. But with accessibility lawsuits increasing every year (8,600+ ADA lawsuits in 2025, with ecommerce sites being the primary target), it's worth paying attention to.
94.8% of websites fail basic accessibility checks according to WebAIM's 2025 report. Agencies aren't immune.

What I built

I built the scanner as a side project called Vía. It scans websites for WCAG 2.2 violations, ranks them by legal risk, explains each one in plain English, and generates AI-powered code fixes.
Not an overlay widget — actual code changes you can copy and implement.
Free to try on any site: viascan.dev
Would love to hear from other devs — do you check accessibility before shipping client work? What tools do you use? What's missing from the current options?

I scanned 5 major UK websites for WCAG 2.2 violations and here are the results.

Richard Huang — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:44:05 +0000

So I built an accessibility scanner that uses Playwright + axe-core in a headless browser to scan websites for WCAG 2.2 violations, then uses the Anthropic API to generate AI code fixes for each one.
To test it, I ran crawls against 5 well-known UK brand websites (10 pages each):

Gymshark — 112 violations (25 critical, 48 serious)
Missguided — 58 violations (21 critical, 16 serious)
The Body Shop — 68 violations (10 critical, 11 serious)
JD Sports — 35 violations (1 critical, 13 serious)
Trainline — 26 violations (1 critical, 10 serious)

Most common issues: missing alt text on product images, form fields without labels, broken keyboard navigation, and insufficient colour contrast. ALL basic violations on every single site.
The stack:

Next.js + TypeScript frontend
Playwright + axe-core via Browserless for scanning
Anthropic API (Claude) for generating code fixes
Supabase for auth and data
Stripe for payments
Vercel for deployment

The scanner injects axe-core 4.10.2 via page.evaluate to bypass Trusted Types, runs the audit, then passes each violation to Claude with the surrounding HTML context to generate a specific fix — not a generic suggestion but still quite easy to replicate imo, but the actual corrected code.
It's live at viascan.dev if anyone wants to try it. Free scan, no signup.
Curious what other devs think — is accessibility something you actively test for in your workflow, or does it always get deprioritised?