Why A11yWatch vs X
Web accessibility tool comparison
A detailed list of comparing tools and services for web accessibility.
Accessibility Features
| Feature | A11yWatch | Pa11y | Axe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live web accessibility testing | |||
| WCAG A-AAA testing and recommendations | |||
| 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 TLD testing | |||
| Parallel website testing | |||
| Handle large workloads and websites | |||
| Alt tag recommendations | |||
| Web accessibility code fixes directly | |||
| Custom smart safeguard CDN | |||
| Custom editable scripts | |||
| Lighthouse reports across pages |
Accessibility Performance
All benches are done on 8gb linux Github Action containers
| Performance | A11yWatch | Pa11y | Axe |
|---|---|---|---|
| https://www.coinbase.com - 5,900 pages | 7 mins | 48 hours+ | 60 hours+ |
| https://www.hbo.com - 7,500 pages | 9 mins | 55 hours+ | 72 hours+ |
| https://a11ywatch.com - 28 pages | 2.1s | 1 min | 2 mins |
Reasons why A11yWatch is faster
Some of the reasons A11yWatch and Pa11y run faster than Axe is due to the protocol of choice to control the browser. A11yWatch and Pa11y use the devtools protocol while Axe 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 page 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.
Accessibility Coverage
| Coverage | A11yWatch | Pa11y | Axe |
|---|---|---|---|
| WCAG | 50%-61% extends Pa11y | 40%-57% uses Axe or HTML_CodeSniffer | 57% |