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There’s a moment when you’re idly scrolling a running service’s logs and your hand stops. That day, I hit that moment in the audit logs of A11y Check, a web accessibility auditing service. Two audits had been stuck “scanning” for hours. Not in progress, not failed — just stuck. This is what people call a zombie task: a job left in the queue, neither dead nor alive. This is the story of catching those two zombies, of two fixes I was sure of missing, and of finding the real cause only on the third try. To skip to the end: the culprit wasn’t my logic but Vercel’s Deployment Protection — or more precisely, my internal-call code that didn’t account for it. ...

“We’re certified, so we should be fine.” It’s an easy thing to believe on the side that builds the website. Yet even on sites with a certification mark, it’s common for a screen reader user to fail to find the log-in button, or a low-vision user to be unable to read gray text on gray. Having been audited once, and being usable right now, are two different stories. The tool I built to shrink that gap is A11y Check. Put in a URL and it audits the accessibility automatically, then hands back a report and a fix guide. This article covers what A11y Check does, how it works, and why I opened the code. Let’s start with where it came from. ...