IBM Equal Access accessibility-checker

Companion reference for axe-a11y. Consult when the project ships to US federal / public-sector customers under Section 508 procurement, when an enterprise compliance program mandates IBM-branded reports, or to cross-check axe results from Selenium / Puppeteer / Playwright suites. For most projects without those constraints, direct axe (SKILL.md) is the standard recommendation - larger ecosystem, simpler integration.

IBM Equal Access provides an accessibility-checker as part of the broader Equal Access Toolkit, supporting a11y across "planning, design, development, and verification phases" (equal-access). The differentiator vs. axe / pa11y / Lighthouse is US Section 508 specificity and IBM-branded enterprise rule sets.

Install

npm install --save-dev accessibility-checker

(Per equal-access.) Cypress uses the cypress-accessibility-checker wrapper; Karma / Selenium / Puppeteer / Playwright are bundled in accessibility-checker.

Authoring scans

const { getCompliance } = require('accessibility-checker');

const results = await getCompliance(page, 'My scan label');
if (results.report.results.filter(r => r.level === 'violation').length > 0) {
  process.exit(1);
}

(Adapted from equal-access; page is a Puppeteer / Playwright page.)

Configuration (.achecker.yml)

ruleArchive: latest
policies:
  - WCAG_2_2
failLevels:
  - violation
  - potentialviolation
reportLevels:
  - violation
  - potentialviolation
  - recommendation
outputFormat:
  - json
  - html
outputFolder: a11y-reports

Rule sets / policies

Per equal-access:

US Section 508 alignment is via the IBM-branded policies (the toolkit's compliance documentation maps Section 508 to specific rule combinations).

Results structure

getCompliance() returns a report with a summary.counts block and a results[] array; each result carries ruleId (e.g. WCAG20_Img_HasAlt), level, message, snippet, and a DOM path. Severity levels:

For CI gating, fail on violation (and optionally potentialviolation); aggregate the rest at the gate.

Playwright integration

const { test, expect } = require('@playwright/test');
const { getCompliance } = require('accessibility-checker');

test('checkout passes IBM Equal Access', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('/checkout');
  const results = await getCompliance(page, 'checkout-page');
  const violations = results.report.results.filter(r => r.level === 'violation');
  expect(violations).toHaveLength(0);
});

For the ratchet pattern (block only on net-new violations), pipe the JSON output to a11y-violation-gate instead of asserting zero.

Anti-patterns

Limitations

• Smaller community than axe-core - fewer integrations and answers.
• Heavier setup than axe's drop-in.
• Section 508 specificity is the strength; for non-US-public-sector projects the extra coverage may not be load-bearing.

References

• IBM Equal Access - equal-access (install, supported test frameworks, rule archives).
• IBM Equal Access Toolkit - https://www.ibm.com/able/toolkit/
• US Section 508 - https://www.section508.gov/