Gatsby Accessibility Checker

Gatsby pioneered the Jamstack architecture — static site generation with React hydration. While Gatsby's market share has declined as Next.js grew, it still powers thousands of production sites, particularly documentation portals, marketing sites, and content-driven blogs built during Gatsby's peak years (2019-2022).

Many of these Gatsby sites are now in maintenance mode, receiving content updates but rarely getting code-level attention. This creates an accessibility debt that compounds over time — plugins stop being updated, WCAG guidelines evolve, and legal requirements tighten. The ADA Title II April 2026 deadline and European Accessibility Act don't care when your site was built. If it's live and serves users, it must be accessible.

Gatsby's build-time rendering and plugin-heavy architecture create specific accessibility patterns:

• gatsby-image and gatsby-plugin-image without alt text — Gatsby's image optimization plugins require alt text, but "placeholder" and empty alt strings are rampant in Gatsby projects, especially when images come from headless CMS sources where alt text was never entered.
• Client-side route transitions without focus management — Gatsby uses @reach/router (or React Router in v5+), and while it attempts focus management on route changes, this behavior is inconsistent and often overridden by page transition plugins like gatsby-plugin-transition-link.
• GraphQL-sourced content missing accessibility metadata — when content comes from Contentful, Sanity, or WordPress via GraphQL, accessibility data like alt text, heading levels, and link descriptions depends entirely on the content source. Gatsby can't enforce what isn't in the data.
• Plugin-generated HTML with accessibility gaps — plugins like gatsby-remark-images, gatsby-plugin-google-analytics, and community plugins inject HTML that may not meet WCAG standards.
• Stale dependency versions with known accessibility bugs — Gatsby sites in maintenance mode often run older versions of React, plugins, and component libraries with known accessibility issues that have been fixed in newer versions.

Start with a CompliScan audit of your live Gatsby site. Because Gatsby outputs static HTML that hydrates with React, the scanner tests both the initial HTML quality and the client-side behavior.

For image accessibility, audit your GraphQL queries to ensure alt text fields are being queried from your CMS. In the CMS itself, make alt text a required field on image assets. For the Gatsby side, use gatsby-plugin-image's alt prop and treat empty strings as bugs, not defaults.

For route transitions, implement a custom wrapper component that manages focus after each navigation. Gatsby's onRouteUpdate API in gatsby-browser.js provides the hook: use it to focus on the main content heading. For stale plugins, run npm audit and check each plugin's changelog for accessibility fixes. If a plugin is abandoned, find a maintained alternative or inline its functionality. CompliScan's AI generates fixes compatible with Gatsby's component patterns and build-time constraints.

If you're maintaining a Gatsby site with significant accessibility debt, you have two paths: remediate in place or migrate to a modern framework. The right choice depends on the site's complexity and remaining lifespan.

For sites that will remain on Gatsby, prioritize fixes by impact: keyboard navigation (affects all non-mouse users), alt text (affects blind and low-vision users), color contrast (affects low-vision users), and form labels (affects screen reader users). CompliScan's reports rank violations by severity and number of affected users, helping you prioritize.

For sites worth migrating, Next.js and Astro are the natural successors to Gatsby. Both support static generation, have better accessibility tooling ecosystems, and are actively maintained. Either way, run a CompliScan baseline scan before you start and a verification scan when you finish — this gives you a measurable before/after compliance improvement to document.