🛰️ Accessibility-Scanner

Automated Accessibility Scanning & Reporting

Stable Version 5.0.4.0 (ALPHA)
Latest Version 5.0.4.3 (ALPHA) [RECOMMENDED]

The Accessibility Scanner is a powerful, self-hosted solution designed to streamline and enhance your web accessibility auditing workflow. Leveraging Puppeteer and axe-core, this comprehensive tool moves beyond simple page scans, allowing for full website crawls, sitemap ingestion, and the automation of complex user journeys like logins and form submissions. It automatically identifies violations, bypasses common bot-detection, and generates highly detailed, interactive reports complete with screenshots and integrated manual findings.

Contact: accessibilityscanner@icloud.com

Software Guides & Documentation

•  The Complete User Guide
•  Troubleshooting Guide
•  Reporting Guide
•  Terms and Conditions

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Technical Feature Overview

The Accessibility Scanner is a locally-hosted desktop application for advanced, automated accessibility auditing. It is designed for developers, testers, and accessibility specialists who require granular control over the scanning process. This alpha release provides a comprehensive feature set built upon Puppeteer for browser automation and the Axe-core engine for accessibility analysis.

Core Auditing Capabilities

• Multi-Modal Auditing: The application supports multiple auditing modes to define a precise scope. Scans can be initiated from a single URL, a comprehensive website crawl, a provided sitemap (.xml or .gz), or a predefined list of local and remote URLs.
• User Journey Emulation: Test dynamic applications and authenticated user flows by scripting a sequence of browser actions. The journey builder supports operations such as navigation, clicks, text input, and select-box interactions, allowing scans to be triggered at any point within a complex workflow.
• Dynamic Content Analysis: Identifies accessibility issues in dynamic DOM states. After an initial page analysis, the scanner can be configured to find and trigger interactive elements (such as tabs, accordions, and buttons) and then re-scan the page to audit the newly exposed content.
• Advanced Anti-Evasion & Adaptive Remediation: Designed to audit sites protected by anti-bot services. The application includes an Adaptive Remediation Engine that responds to network-level blocking by progressively increasing crawl delays and enabling stealth protocols. This is complemented by proactive page content analysis to detect JS challenges and CAPTCHAs, which triggers advanced browser fingerprint spoofing to mitigate detection.

Configuration & Control

• Device & Viewport Emulation: Emulates a wide range of devices via a library of built-in presets or through fully customisable parameters, including screen dimensions, user-agent strings, and device scale factors. It also supports scanning all standard viewports (desktop, tablet, mobile) in a single session for comprehensive responsive testing.
• Network & Environment Control: Supports proxy routing for all scan traffic via HTTP, HTTPS, or SOCKS protocols. The application provides granular control over system timeouts (e.g., navigation, Axe-core execution) to accommodate diverse network conditions.
• Persistent Browser Sessions: Maintains a persistent browser session by preserving cookies and local storage between scans. This simplifies the testing of authenticated areas by removing the need for repeated manual logins.

System Stability & Performance

• Intelligent Trap-Avoidance (Smart Crawl): Includes a Smart Crawl engine to mitigate common crawler traps. It analyses URL structures to identify and avoid infinite paths often found in calendars, layered navigation, and pagination.
• Resilient Request Handling: Features an automatic retry mechanism with exponential backoff to handle transient network errors, ensuring the scan is not derailed by temporary connectivity issues.
• Parallel Processing Engine: Includes a parallel processing engine that utilises multiple concurrent headless browser instances to perform discovery and analysis simultaneously, significantly reducing audit times for large-scale crawls.
• Long-Scan Memory Management: For extensive sequential crawls, the application is configured to periodically restart the browser instance. This process prevents memory leaks and ensures stable performance over scans spanning thousands of pages.

Reporting & Workflow Integration

• Consolidated HTML Reports: Generates single, self-contained HTML reports that aggregate all automated findings and any manually entered issues into a filterable and searchable document.
• Visual Defect Identification: Provides high-resolution screenshots that highlight the specific DOM element associated with an accessibility violation, offering clear visual context for remediation.
• Integrated Manual Issue Tracking: The UI allows auditors to document findings from manual testing directly. These entries are incorporated into the final report, creating a unified audit document.
• Streamlined Remediation Workflow: Generates pre-formatted ticket content for each identified issue, including code snippets, CSS selectors, reproduction steps, and environmental details, suitable for direct use in development trackers like Jira or GitHub.

Additional Technical Features

• Site Analysis Mode: An initial analysis function that inspects a target URL's technical stack to provide automated recommendations for optimal scan settings.
• Granular Axe-Core Rule Customisation: Allows for audits to be configured beyond standard WCAG tags by either disabling specific Axe rules or supplying a list of specific rules to run.
• Advanced Browser Control: Provides options to modify low-level browser launch arguments, disable GPU acceleration, and control JavaScript execution during the link discovery phase of a crawl.
• Deep Content Analysis: The scanner's capabilities extend to scanning content within iFrames, performing a basic accessibility tagging check on linked PDF documents, and a compatibility mode to handle sites with a strict Trusted Types Content Security Policy (CSP).

Note: This application is under active development, so screenshots and videos may feature an earlier build.

Additionally, by downloading, installing, or using the Accessibility Scanner Application, you agree to the Terms and Conditions. If you do not agree with these Terms, you are not permitted to use the Application.