🚧 This project is still working in progress and is not guaranteed to work properly.

Visible

Visible is a framework that helps developers to build better websites from the perspective of accessibility.

Features

🔎 Validation ― Visible can run fully automated validation based on the web standard ACT (Accessibility Conformance Testing) just by putting the URL. The result always comes out with highlighted codes and detailed messages so you can immediately start fixing the problem.
🤖 Suggestion ― Unlike other test tools, we also provide suggestions that may help you to understand the a11y more. Suggestions are so flexible that you can create your own algorithm such as generating caption with an AI.
🤓 Extensible ― Visible supports plugins which has been inspired by ESLint so you can create your own configs, rules, suggestions or even browsers! Plugins can be published via npm so you can share your own tips to other developers.
👗 First-class CSS support ― Thanks to the CDP (Chrome Devtools Protocol), Visible can also report CSS issues with a highlight indicating which CSS declaration has caused the problem. This can be combined with a suggestion of course!
💻 GUI and CLI ― Visible is also available on both an online demo and a command line. You can check the issue instantly by the GUI, or customize CLI and built into the pipeline.

Goals

Visible is designed to be an alternative to existing tools to help beginners who are not familiar with accessibility issues, effects, and ways to fix to understand it correctly.

Accessibility standards such as WCAG is defined in behavioral aspects, while programmers code the procedures. Many of the existing tools are not able to close the gap between behaviors and procedures, and it is the biggest difficulty for understanding the accessibility problems.

By combining the CDP and existing linter technologies, Visible can discover the location of code that is actually causing the problem. This design not only helps knowing line numbers but also used for suggestions and enhancing CSS supports.

Additionally, while most of the existing tools are scripts running on the browsers, Visible is a Node.js package consists of extensible modules like ESLint so you can share configurations and plugins and contribute to the web accessibility.

Installation (CLI)

Make sure that you have installed Node.js (LTS) and npm and then run the following command.

npm i @visi/core @visi/cli

By default, @visi/cli does not install any additional rules or drivers. So if you want to use Puppeteer as a driver and WCAG as a rule, you'd also need to run the command below.

npm i @visi/plugin-puppeteer @visi/plugin-wcag

Then, create a .visiblerc file. See documentation of config for the detail.

{
  "plugins": [
    "@visi/plugin-puppeteer",
    "@visi/plugin-wcag",
  ],
  "driver": "@visi/plugin-puppeteer",
  "rules": ["@visi/plugin-wcag"],
}

Finally, you can run visible command. You can use --help to show helps.

visible --url https://example.com

Similar Projects

Axe ― Accessibility testing tool maintained by Deque. Although they only work with DOM, It is highly accurate and a lot of users and has also adopted by Lighthouse and Webhint. Axe has contributed to the web accessibility a lot through projects like ACT, and has inspired many web developers (including me!)
Wave ― Accessibility testing service developed by WebAIM. Wave comes with rich web interface so you can immediately comprehend the issues. Wave is not open sourced, but has a web API.
Alfa ― Accessibility testing framework maintained by Siteimprove. Alfa is built on top of ACT like Visible, and has compatibility to EARL. Alfa is a one of Horizon 2020 project and funded by the European Union.
Acot ─ Accessibility testing framework. Acot uses the latest web standard AOM (Accessibility Object Model) provided by Puppeteer to detect problems. Acot has a plugin for working on Storybook.