Accessibility audit

The Accessibility tab runs an automated accessibility scan against each crawled page using axe-core in headless Chrome. It surfaces WCAG violations grouped by impact level, giving you a prioritised view of the barriers your site presents to users of assistive technology.

This tab requires headless mode. axe-core needs a rendered DOM to evaluate, so the analysis is only available when the crawl is configured to use headless Chrome. Pages crawled without headless rendering will not appear in the accessibility results.

Stats

The summary bar at the top of the tab shows four figures:

Stat	What it measures
Average score	The mean accessibility score across all analysed pages. Higher is better; 100 means axe-core found no violations on a page.
Pages with issues	The number of pages where at least one violation was found, regardless of severity.
Mixed content	Pages loading insecure (HTTP) resources over a secure (HTTPS) connection. Mixed content can break assistive technology that relies on secure contexts.
Pages analysed	The total number of pages that received an accessibility scan. This may be fewer than the total crawled page count if some pages failed to render in headless mode.

Results table

Below the stats, a sortable table lists every analysed page with its violation counts broken down by impact level:

Column	Description
URL	The page address. Click to open the page inspector for full detail.
Score	The page's accessibility score, from 0 to 100.
Critical	Violations that prevent users from accessing content entirely. Examples: interactive elements with no accessible name, content hidden from the accessibility tree that should not be.
Serious	Violations that create significant barriers. Examples: images missing alt text, form inputs without labels, insufficient colour contrast at the AA level.
Moderate	Violations that make content harder to use but do not block access. Examples: missing document language, duplicate IDs on the page, tabindex values greater than zero.
Minor	Violations that affect best practice more than usability. Examples: redundant ARIA roles, missing landmark regions, links with identical text pointing to different destinations.

Sort by any column to focus on the pages that need the most attention. The default sort places the lowest-scoring pages first.

How it works

When headless mode is enabled, Consuela launches a headless Chrome instance and renders each crawled page in it. After the page settles, axe-core runs against the live DOM and returns a list of violations. Each violation includes:

The WCAG criterion it relates to (such as 1.1.1 Non-text Content or 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value).
An impact level: critical, serious, moderate, or minor.
The CSS selector of the element that triggered the finding.
A description of what is wrong and how to fix it.

The violation counts in the results table are aggregated from these individual findings. The page score is derived from the number and severity of violations relative to the number of elements on the page.

Images missing alt text appear here as serious violations, and are also available in the page inspector's Images tab with per-image detail including the image URL, dimensions, and surrounding context.

Limitations

This is an automated scan, not a comprehensive accessibility audit. Automated tools like axe-core typically identify 30 to 50 percent of accessibility barriers. The rest require manual inspection: navigating the page with a screen reader, testing keyboard-only flows, verifying that dynamic content updates are announced, and checking that the visual presentation supports users with cognitive and learning disabilities.

What automated scanning catches well:

Missing or empty alt text on images.
Colour contrast below WCAG AA thresholds.
Form inputs without associated labels.
Invalid or misused ARIA attributes.
Missing document language declarations.
Duplicate IDs that confuse assistive technology.

What it cannot assess:

Whether alt text accurately describes the image content.
Whether focus order follows a logical reading sequence.
Whether custom widgets behave correctly under keyboard and screen reader interaction.
Whether content is understandable when read aloud.
Whether time-based interactions provide adequate time or can be paused.

Use the findings here as a starting point. A zero-violation score means the automated checks passed, not that the page is fully accessible. Manual testing with assistive technology remains necessary for a complete assessment.