Axe-core vs PA11Y: Which one should you choose?

DRANK

We use axe-core by Deque regularly as part of acceptance tests. With GitLab now offering PA11Y as part of the Continuous Integration (CI) Pipeline with zero config, I wanted to understand how it stacked up against axe-core. Can you drop axe-core for PA11Y? Can you drop PA11Y for axe-core? Should you use both?Spoiler alert, all automated tools perform poorly. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them. But we need to remain realistic about how many errors we may still have on our pages, even if the tools can’t find them.As an experiment, we usually log the method, results then conclusion. But I know the results and the conclusion are the parts you probably want to know. So I’ll cover those first. If you are interested, and you want to read more on the method and the details, you can read the rest of the post.If you want to read all the raw outputs from the tests, a detailed breakdown of each test, or run the tests again for yourself, you can find the axe-core-vs-pa11y project on Githu…