A smarter Way to Test Accessibility - a comparison of top tools (Lighthouse, Tenon.io and WAVE API)

There's no doubt that accessibility is important. WCAG 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation nearly 20 years ago, and WCAG 2.1 is soon to be a Candidate Recommendation. Our community has been talking about accessibility for years, and each major release of Drupal is more accessible than the last. Nevertheless, we find it hard to make the time to thoroughly test our work, and like all testing, when crunch time comes, if it's not automated, it may not happen.

We can drastically reduce the effort involved in accessibility testing, and reduce human errors, by automating some tests as part of a standard Continuous Integration (CI) process. There are a number of paid and free tools available on the market, and we've chosen three to compare.

1. Google's Litehouse (using Deque's aXe-core rules engine)
   • Open source
   • Free
   • Includes tests for performance, progressive web apps, and more
2. Tenon.io
   • Software as a service
   • 30-day trial
   • Growing in popularity,
3. WAVE API (from WebAIM.org)
   • Software as a service and self-hosted
   • 100 free credits
   • From the makers of the popular browser extension (http://wave.webaim.org/extension/)

What you will learn:

1. What is automated accessibility testing, and what can be tested
2. How to integrate Lighthouse, Tenon.io and WAVE API with your CI process
3. What are the benefits of Lighthouse
4. What are the benefits of Tenon.io
5. What are the benefits of WAVE API

Slides available at

https://laura-johnson.github.io/accessibility-presentation/