The Kind of Accessibility Bug No Automated Scanner Can Catch
An automated accessibility scan reports zero errors on a form. Every field has a label, contrast passes, ARIA is valid. But the form is still confusing to actually operate with a screen reader running.
What's true about this situation?
The correct answer is "Automated tools can't judge whether a label is meaningful or a flow makes sense."
A zero-error automated scan is evidence of "nothing a machine could catch," not evidence a component is genuinely usable — automated tools can't evaluate whether a label is meaningful, whether a tab order is logical, or whether an interaction makes sense with a screen reader running, because those require judgment automated rules can't make. That's exactly what a manual keyboard-only or screen-reader pass is for.
A zero-error scan doesn't guarantee full compliance, let alone genuine usability. Automated tools don't catch usability issues as a rule — that's their documented blind spot, not an occasional exception. The result isn't a false positive needing a rerun; the scan is working correctly, it's simply checking a narrower set of things than "is this usable."
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