Accessibility Regression Audit

Baseline-driven axe-core accessibility audits for websites and web applications. Detect new WCAG violations, track resolved findings, approve narrowly scoped exceptions with expiration dates, and monitor accessible-name changes across deployments.

Release status: Initial public alpha. Automated checks find many important issues but do not replace keyboard, screen-reader, zoom, motion, and cognitive-accessibility testing by people.

Features

• Multi-page axe-core audits in real Chromium
• WCAG tag selection
• Violation and critical-impact budgets
• Stable page/rule/target fingerprints
• Baseline comparison for new and resolved findings
• Target-scoped exceptions with expiration dates and reasons
• Configurable accessible-name snapshots
• Incomplete axe results surfaced for manual review
• JSON and Markdown reports with GitHub job summaries
• Docker image and GitHub Action

Install and run

Requires Node.js 22.19 or newer and Chrome or Chromium.

npm install
npm run audit -- --config config.example.yaml

Compare with a retained report:

npm run audit -- --config config.example.yaml --baseline previous-report.json

Reports are written to reports/accessibility-regression-report.json and reports/accessibility-regression-report.md. Failed budgets or regressions return exit code 1; configuration and execution errors return exit code 2.

Exceptions

Exceptions should be narrow, explained, and temporary:

exceptions:
  - rule: color-contrast
    target: ".legacy-banner"
    expires: 2026-12-31
    reason: Legacy banner scheduled for replacement

Expired exceptions stop suppressing findings automatically.

Accessible-name snapshots

Selectors in name_snapshots retain the computed label surrogate for matching elements. Baseline comparison reports changed labels, helping detect accidental button and navigation renaming.

Project boundary

This repository is a generic audit engine. It contains no client data, private URLs, credentials, internal accessibility policy, or production exception lists.

License

MIT © 2026 CodeVelo.dev LLC.