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Case study · Quality Engineering

Accessibility Test Framework

Accessibility testing that produces evidence, not a pass mark

Automated WCAG scanning wired into a BDD suite, with every violation rendered as a report a non-engineer can act on.

What it is

An automated accessibility audit that runs like any other test. Selenium drives real pages, the Deque Axe engine scans the rendered DOM, and a React interface turns the raw findings into a report the whole team can read.

Type
Test framework
Target
Any web application
Output
JSON → HTML report

The problem

Accessibility is usually checked once, by hand, just before release — when it is far too late and far too expensive to fix.

The tools that automate it return raw JSON. An engineer can read that. A product owner, a designer or a compliance officer cannot, so the findings stall.

What we built

Three decisions that shaped it.

01

Scanning inside the test suite

Deque Axe runs against real pages driven by Selenium, so accessibility is checked on the rendered DOM in the same run as every other test.

02

Scenarios in plain English

Cucumber keeps each check readable as a sentence, so the suite doubles as documentation of what is being enforced.

03

A report for the whole team

The JSON is transformed into a React interface grouping violations by severity and by page — readable without opening a terminal.

What it does

Six things, plainly.

Rule-based scanning

Axe checks the rendered page, not the source.

Plain-English tests

Each scenario reads as a sentence in Gherkin.

Grouped by severity

Critical to minor, and by page.

Element-level detail

Every finding names the element and the rule.

Browser-based report

Opens as a page, not a terminal dump.

Fits into CI

Runs with the rest of the suite on every build.

Built with

Language
Java
Browser driver
Selenium WebDriver
Specification
CucumberGherkin
Audit engine
Deque Axe
Reporting UI
ReactTailwind CSSNode.js

What came out of it

The outcome.

Every build

Accessibility runs with the rest of the suite instead of as a pre-release scramble.

Whole team

Violations land somewhere designers and product owners can act on them.

Evidence trail

Each run leaves a report that can be attached to a procurement or compliance response.

Built in-house as a working reference for how we approach quality engineering.

All work

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