A WAVE accessibility alternative

WAVE is made by WebAIM, the nonprofit at Utah State University that also publishes the annual WebAIM Million study. It runs as a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, and places icons directly on the page: errors, contrast errors, alerts, structural elements and ARIA. That is a good way to learn how a page is built, and why it is widely used in teaching.

The results live in your browser, though. To pass them on you take screenshots, or pay for WebAIM's API, which is billed per credit.

WAVE uses its own evaluation engine. This scanner uses axe-core, the engine behind Lighthouse and axe DevTools. The two overlap on the common failures but word, group and count things differently, and WAVE's "alerts" are closer to axe's "needs review" than to failures. Run both and the totals will differ without either being wrong.

Here, every finding is tied to a WCAG success criterion and conformance level, which is what you need if the question is "which criteria are we failing, and on which templates".

• A link instead of screenshots. Each scan is a report page with the failing elements outlined, which you can send to a client or developer.
• Exports. CSV, JSON or Markdown with the selector and a fix link per finding, ready for an issue tracker or a coding agent.
• A CI check. A CLI and GitHub Action fail the build when a change reintroduces an issue.

Plenty of people use both: WAVE to understand a page visually, and a scan like this to record and track what fails.