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Phill Jenkins edited this page Mar 4, 2025 · 56 revisions

Welcome to the equal-access Wiki

About

The IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker is an open-source freely available set of tools for web developers and accessibility auditors. The accessibility-checker-engine utilizes a set of rules that map to accessibility standards to detect accessibility issues in web content and applications. The accessibility-checker-extension integrates into browser DevTools, providing an integrated scanning experience, a keyboard checker mode visualization, and helps users quickly identify the source of accessibility issues, understand what to do, and try fixes. The Checker is also available as a package for CI/CD environments and automated testing frameworks.

The Checker does not collect or send your web data to any servers:

  • all your web data is kept local
  • the rules and engine are downloaded and run locally
  • no data is being used, sold, or transferred to 3rd parties

Extensions

The Checker is available as a browser development tools (DevTools) extension from the following stores:

Packages for test automation

Packages are available for integrating into your Continuous Integrations/Continuous Development (CI/CD) environments, such as Node Package Manager NPM for JavaScript environments and testing frameworks (parsing engines) such as Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright, and Zombie:

How-to Videos

  • Intro video - An introduction to the browser web developer tools extension and how to install it
  • Focus view video - A demo of the ‘Focus view’ feature for unit testing
  • Create reports video - A demo of how to create reports and scan multiple pages

Scanning multiple pages

You might want to simply scan a set of pages. The Checker provides several approaches that will fit your environment and ecosystem to scan a set of pages once and then repeatedly scan the same set of pages or files.

Command-line multi-scan

Instead of using your browser’s DevTools Checker extension and manually scanning and storing each scan report, another way to scan multiple pages is via a command-line approach. The accessibility-checker module provides a basic command-line utility that will allow scanning files, directories, and a list of URLs:

  1. Create a .txt file with path(s) to files, directories, or a list of URLs to be scanned need link to boilerplate .txt file example
  2. Provide the npx achecker command the full path to your .txt file to be able to run the scan
    • e.g., npx achecker path/to/your/file.txt
    • e.g., run from a macOS or VSCode terminal
  3. Run npx achecker

Pro tip:

  • To install and run npx, you don't need to install it separately as it comes bundled with NPM; simply install the latest version of Node.js, which includes npm and npx.

How to use Command-line multi-scan:

  • Run: to run a command with npx, type "npx " in your terminal (e.g. macOS or VSCode).
  • Functionality: npx allows you to execute commands from npm packages without needing to install them globally.
  • Output: set your configuration to specify the format of your results.

Prerequisites for Command-line multi-scan

  1. Get a crawler to create a set of pages or list of URLs to be scanned (optional)
  2. Install NodeJS and NPM (new to NPM? read about the NodeJS ecosystem)

Resources

Support