I've been revisiting web accessibility. It's something I remember first learning about accessibility many years ago at a training workshop run by Vision Australia back when I worked at the University of South Australia. The web has progressed a little bit in the last 15 odd years, but the challenge of accessibility remains. More recently I had the opportunity to update my accessibility knowledge by attending a couple of presentations given by Larene Le Gassick (who also happens to be a fellow Microsoft MVP).

I wondered how accessible my blog was. Theoretically it should be pretty good, considering it is largely text with just a few images. There shouldn't be any complicated navigation system or confusing layout. Using tools to check accessibility, and in particular compliance with a particular level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard will not give you the complete picture. But it can identify some deficiencies and give you confidence that particular problems have been eliminated.

Ross Mullen wrote a great article showing how to use the pa11y GitHub Action as part of your continuous integration workflow to automatically scan files at build time. Pa11y is built on the axe-core library.

Further research brought me to Accessibility Insights - Android, browser and Windows desktop accessibility tools produced by Microsoft. From here I then found that Microsoft had also made a GitHub Action (currently in development) Accessibility Insights Action, which as I understand it, also leverages axe-core.

The next few blog posts will cover my adventures working towards being able to run that action against my blog. I thought it would be simple, but it turns out I had some other issues with my blog that needed to be addressed along the way. Stay tuned!