EngineeringScoreaxe DevTools
Our scan runs axe-core and keeps the count, never the elements. The axe DevTools extension runs those rules in your browser and points at them.
Why our report names it
Our accessibility checks are axe-core rules, and we discard the part you need most: the capture stores how many nodes a rule failed on and not which nodes, so a violation reaches your report as a rule name and a number with nothing to click. Our free accessibility checker page already concedes this and already names this extension. It is the same engine, in the browser, with the elements still attached.
What it doesn't do
- Automation settles the questions that can be settled by reading markup. Whether a keyboard user can get back out of your modal, and what a screen reader actually announces once it is in there, are not among them, and running the same rules interactively does not move that boundary.
- The parts beyond plain automation are gated. Deque marks Intelligent Guided Testing, user flow analysis, testing an individual component and issue deduplication as not included in the free axe DevTools extension, so what the free tier gives you is the rules, well presented, and not the guided half.
- One page at a time, the page in front of you. There is no crawl, so a template broken on every product page is a finding you get once and have to generalise across your site yourself.
- A clean run is not a compliance claim. Our own report asks whether a keyboard and screen-reader pass happens as well as an automated one, and it asks that because a page can pass every automated rule and still be one a person cannot complete a purchase on.
What it does
- It is the same engine our scan runs, so a rule that fires here fires there. What changes is where it runs: inside the page you are looking at, after you have signed in, opened the menu and reached the state no crawler ever gets to.
- Deque marks basic automation and remediation documentation and guidance as included in the free extension, so a violation arrives carrying the standard it breaches and guidance on the fix, rather than a rule identifier to go and look up somewhere else.
- Findings leave as JSON, CSV or JUnit XML, or go straight into Jira as an issue. That is the difference between an audit somebody reads once and an audit that turns into work with a name on it.
More on the problem
Nothing here is gated behind us. Go straight to axe DevTools and make your own mind up.
Sources
Every claim about axe DevTools on this page was read on from the pages below. Products change and this page does not change with them, so treat the date as the claim's expiry rather than its publication.
- Deque's axe DevTools Extension page, with its capability grid read from the per-cell Included and Not included markers rather than its labels: basic automation with axe-core and remediation guidance are in the free extension, while Intelligent Guided Testing, user flow analysis, component testing and issue deduplication are not, plus the JSON, CSV, JUnit XML and Jira outputs it lists
- Deque's axe DevTools product page: that axe-core is Deque's own engine and that the browser extension is the member of the axe DevTools family that runs in a page
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