Acest - Accessibility testing

Acest is an NPM package you can use to run accessibility tests on different urls at the same time. It works using Pa11y under the hood.

You can use it through the command line, you just need a config file!

npm acest

Table of Content

• Features
• CI/CD
• Requirements
• Installation
• Config file

Features and Commands

Acest can be used in 3 different ways:

As a testing tool

sIt will test your urls and show a pass or fail depending on your set threshold (or the default one).

npm acest

[==================================================] 100%

TEST FAILED - 18 errors at github.com
TEST PASSED - 3 errors at google.com
All tests completed in 5 seconds...

To generate archives of your pages accessibility score

It will generate .json monthly archive files of your tests, to keep a history of your path to accessibility or a record of your compliance!

npm acest --archive [-a]

You will find the archive file in the folder /accessibility as acest-report-[year]-[month]

To generate a general report file of the last 12 months

It will generate a .json report file with the record of the latest test of the last 12 months.

npm acest --visualizer [-v]

(Coming soon) A visualization of the data and comparison between different months. This is useful especially for teams that need buy-in from other departments.

With a different config file

By default Acest will look for a config file called acest.config.js at the root of you project (where you are executing the acest command).

If you don't like the default name, you can use your own name, just provide the filename as a parameter with the command:

npm acest --config [name-of-your-file].js

CI/CD

Most CI/CD pipelines allow you to execute an NPM command (or YARN) as a step for your build or release. The same goes if you are using Docker.

In this case, as we need to have a reachable version of the website we are going to test, we use it as part of the release pipeline between development, testing and production websites.

(Coming soon) Use case on Azure Pipelines.

Requirements

As Pa11y requires Node.js 8+ to run, that's the minimum version you need to run Acest.

Installation

To install Acest you need to run

npm install -g acest

N.B. If you don't install Acest globally, but only locally as npm install --save-dev acest you will need this command to use it:

npx acest

Config File

acest.config.js or your own named config file will set Acest up to handle different configurations. This is what it look like:

module.exports={
    urls: [
        "test.myurl.com",
        ... /* your urls */
    ],
    threshold: 10,
    defaultOptions: {
        timeout: 60000,
        ... /* your other default options */
    },
    specialOptions: {
        matches: [
            "^test\.",
            ... /* all matches for the special options */
        ],
        options: {
            headers: {
                cookie: "your-cookie=value; your-other-cookie=value2;",
            },
            ... /* your other special options */
        }
    },
    outputFolder: 'your-folder'
}

Configuration options:

urls [array]

required

This option is an array of the urls you would like to test.

urls: [
    "https:www.google.com",
    "https:www.github.com"
]

threshold [number]

Default: 0

This option sets the number of errors that will make your page fail the test.

threshold: 10

defaultOptions [object]

Default: {}

This option sets an object of configurations to attach to your Pa11y call, for example timeout, viewport... See Pa11y configuration for all the options you can set.

defaultOptions: {
    timeout: 60000
}

specialOptions [object]

Default: {}

This option sets an object with configurations to attach to your Pa11y calls that match specific Regex patterns. It uses 2 properties:

• matches [array] An array of Regex patterns to test your urls against. N.B. Write your matches without leading and trailing slashes.

• options [object] An object with the options to use Pa11y with for this specific urls. It can take all the options as defaultOptions above.

This is very useful for certain pages that you might be able to reach only if logged-in, for example.

specialOptions: {
    matches: [
        "/account/"
    ],
    options: {
        headers: {
            cookies: "authcookie=myAuThCookie; session=MysEsSioNCOokIe;"
        }
    }
}

outputFolder [string]

Default: "accessibility"

The name of the folder you want your archive files and visualizer to be outputted in.

outputFolder: "my-report-folder"

Roadmap

These are the features I am currently working on, they are roughly ordered by priority. I don't have ETAs for them, but I welcome any contribution.

• Process exit for fail
• Implement the visualizer front end
• Configure the frequency of archives

For any problems or suggestions please use the issues tab here on Github.