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Axe (Accessibility Integration Tests)

Axe tests are used to test for accessibility issues on key pages. These tests are not run as part of our CI deployment process as they can contain a lot of information, but instead run once per day via a GitHub action against dev.

Axe tests are run via Playwright as a subset of tests using the @a11y tag. Accessibility issues are reported in the GitHub action output, which can be downloaded and reviewed.

The axe spec files can be found in the ./tests/playwright/specs/a11y/ directory.

Running Axe tests locally

To run the Axe tests locally, you can use the following command from the ./tests/playwright/ directory:

npm run a11y-tests

Test types

The Axe tests consist of two different test types:

  1. Full page scans - Scans an entire page for accessibility issues
  2. Component scans - Scans a specific element for issues (such as the main navigation and footer)

These tests can also be run at both desktop and mobile viewport sizes.

Test results

Test results are output to the console, and any issues found will be created as HTML report files in the ./tests/playwright/test-results-a11y/ directory.

When run via the GitHub action, the reports are also output to the annotation logs for each test job.

Axe rules

A list of all the Axe rules that are checked by the tests can be viewed in the axe-core repo.