A WAVE accessibility alternative

WAVE, from WebAIM, overlays icons directly on your page to show errors, alerts, and structure in place. It is excellent for visually learning where issues are and for teaching accessibility, and it runs on its own evaluation engine.

This scanner runs axe-core instead and leans rule-based: every finding is tied to a specific WCAG success criterion and conformance level, grouped by severity, with the exact failing element. If you think in terms of "which criteria am I failing and how badly", that mapping is the difference.

• Shareable report. A public link instead of a panel only you can see, so you can send results to a client or developer.
• Export for devs and agents. Download the findings as JSON or Markdown, each with the selector, the failure, and a fix link, ready to drop into an issue or hand to a coding agent.
• CI gate. A CLI and GitHub Action fail the build when accessibility regresses.
• Gradient contrast. Where text sits on a CSS gradient, this resolves the worst-case contrast to a real pass or fail instead of leaving it for review.

WAVE is still a fine choice when you want to see issues laid over the live page and learn the structure. Many teams use both: WAVE to understand a page visually, this to map findings to WCAG, share them, and gate CI.

Automated tools, WAVE and axe-core alike, catch the machine-checkable subset of WCAG, not the whole standard. This scanner states that plainly and flags what still needs a human, so an automated pass is never mistaken for full compliance.