Why A11yWatch VS X
Web accessibility tool comparison
A detailed list of comparing tools and services for web accessibility.
Accessibility Features
| Feature | A11yWatch | Wave | Deque |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live web accessibility testing | |||
| WCAG A-AAA audits | |||
| Section508 audits | |||
| CI pipelines | |||
| Command Line Interface | |||
| Monitoring | |||
| Cross site testing | |||
| Custom actions to run on pages | |||
| Custom request headers configuration | |||
| Dynamic url handling | |||
| Dynamic subdomains testing | |||
| Dynamic TLDs testing | |||
| Concurrent website testing | |||
| Live visual website testing | |||
| Handle large workloads and websites | |||
| Alt tag recommendations | |||
| Web accessibility code remediations directly | |||
| Lighthouse reports across pages |
Accessibility Performance
All benches are done on 8gb linux Github Action containers
| Performance and Costs | A11yWatch | Wave | Deque |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average pages tested per 10$ spent | 8,000-15,000 daily | 100 | 10-75? |
| https://www.coinbase.com - 5,900 pages | 2 mins | 48 hours+ | 60 hours+ |
| https://www.hbo.com - 7,500 pages | 3 mins | 55 hours+ | 72 hours+ |
| https://a11ywatch.com - 28 pages | 0.1s | 1 min | 2 mins |
Reasons why A11yWatch is faster
Some of the reasons A11yWatch and Wave run faster than Deque is due to the protocol of choice to control the browser. A11yWatch and Wave use the devtools protocol while Deque uses WebDriver. Devtools protocol allows you to manipulate the entire control beyond the UI layer to enhance the way a it would normally load a web app by doing things like intercepting network request, manipulating elements, and more. A11yWatch goes to the next level with optimisations for speed by leveraging multiple technologies like Rust, protocols like gRPC and efficient algorithms. We also use a custom runner that is over 10,000 times faster than any open source headless runner.
Accessibility Coverage
| Coverage | A11yWatch | Wave | Deque |
|---|---|---|---|
| WCAG | 50%-63% | 40%-57% uses Axe or HTML_CodeSniffer | 57% Axe |