In a world designed for what’s considered the “average” person, people don’t stop and think about how the differently-abled will be affected by various design choices. This mentality unfortunately translates to the online world as well. Luckily there are a number of people in the world who are working hard to ensure that people of all abilities can use the internet. That’s where Axe comes in. Axe is an open source web accessibility tester which allows the user to test websites to check if they meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) -- a standardized set of rules that ensure a website is accessible to all people. Axe is a great tool, however it lacks certain abilities which would make the tool more effective.
This product is a wrapper of the Deque Labs' aXe accessibility API. Currently no existing accessibility engine has the functionality to scan multiple pages of a website at a time. Once the engine returns results, it offers no means to export data or templated responses
This project will expand on the Axe Browser Extension's current capabilities to allow Wadke Consulting an easier way to test the accessibility of their clients webpages. The program will include the ability to test multiple pages and specify which level of criteria it meets based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The results will then be exported to an interface where the user can edit or add in other violations. Each WCAG violation will have a template response. Once the user is satisfied with the results, the data can be exported to a CSV file.
Please note that there are some dependency vulnerabilities in this project, so upgrade them at your own risk.
- Node.js: >16.0
- Python: >3.9
- Firefox: v94
- Chrome: v96
- Optional: Nodemon
- Spider the current website
- User friendly and accessible interface.
- Option to select WCAG levels.
- Includes WCAG violations that require human testing (e.g. color contrast, WCAG AAA violations)
- Export reuslts as a CSV
- Export results to a human editable GUI (a la Google Sheets)
- Hosted in a cloud platform for anyone to use
- Ensure the program is accessibility engine agnostic
- What this means in this context is reworking the project to ensure that integrating other accessibility testing engines as painless as possible. There are some javascript-based libraries which would be compatible, but there might need to be
- Integrate more testing engines
- An error that can occur with the Spider relates to Sails not being able to locate the python path, or python isn’t added as an environment variable to the local system.
- When running ACE, an error can and will occur if the correct browsers aren’t installed on the system. Selenium Webdriver doesn’t ship with browser binaries, but instead relies on the browsers being already installed on the local system.
- In the event the backend errors out in the middle of running, the frontend will register a Network error in the frontend inspection console.
- If the user is experiencing issues with the Spider on Windows, please ensure the required .whl files are installed.
- In the event an error occurs with ACE, please create an issue. In the event there’s an error with wcag-reference-cjs, please create an issue in that repository.
- Firefox is run using Mozilla's Geckodriver. At some points when running a large number of browser sessions, a browser may quit and the console will output “Browsing context discarded”. This is an issue with geckodriver and cannot be remedied by our project.