Deque Systems a leading Accessibility company has open sourced their accessibility rules engine aXE which is a light weight JavaScript library that will work with any modern browser & technology. Developers can leverage the aXe rules engine to automate their accessibility scans & get more accurate results, with more than 15yrs of experience Deque Systems brings a unique product that differentiates itself from other open source accessibility tools like quail, tanaguru etc…
Manifesto
- Automated accessibility testing rules must have a zero false positive rate
- Automated accessibility testing rules must be lightweight and fast
- Automated accessibility testing rules must work in all modern browsers
- Automated accessibility testing rules must, themselves, be tested automatically
Announcement by Preety Kumar CEO of Deque Systems
Accessibility Testing Goes Open Source and Mainstream
Introducing aXe: The Accessibility Engine
I am thrilled to make our award-winning accessibility rules engine available as open source so we as a community can build upon 15 years of industry-leading accessibility research and best practices.
Accessibility experts can now stop duplicating efforts and work from a common set of rules. Developers and testers can quickly get consistent, reliable, and meaningful results that are actionable. Automated accessibility testing results become easy to understand, extend, and integrate.
The Accessibility Engine, or aXe, is a compact JavaScript library that is open source and available on GitHub. This library makes integration into any development and testing tool simple and quick. Use aXe with any JavaScript framework and any modern browser. Enjoy zero false positive results, eliminating noise and frustration.
Deque’s mission is digital equality. If we are to achieve that mission together, we need to take a new approach. Our community goal is to create the most trusted set of accessibility rules anywhere. We invite cooperation rather than competition. Join us in making automated accessibility testing truly “accessible”!
Deque has been invited to contribute the aXe open source library to the W3C WAI Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group , as work is under consideration there for a normative set of rules for evaluating WCAG 2.0 conformance.
We hope you will join us in our mission and help bring equality to the digital world.
Sincerely,
Preety Kumar
Getting started
First download the package:
npm install axe-core –save-dev
Now include the javascript file in each of your iframes in you fixtures or test systems:
Now insert calls at each point in your tests where a new piece of UI becomes visible or exposed:
axe.a11yCheck(document, function (results) {
ok(results.violations.length === 0, ‘Should be no accessibility issues’);
// complete the async call
…
});
More
For more information on the aXe accessibility rules engine please refer to the following links.
aXe product page
aXe on GITHUB