Accessibility the Easy Way With Deque's Linter

I have been interested in, though never an expert in, web accessibility, for years. I believe common-sense affordances like alt text and keyboard navigability in a website are shining examples of the curb-cut effect, so while I am not (currently) disabled¹, I do at least try to make my websites accessible.

But I didn’t know until attending Abbey Perini’s talk at CodeWord last week that I could automate at least some of this work with an accessibility linter.

Wait, a what?

Yeah, my reaction too. But just like Prettier or eslint can enforce code style rules, an accessibility linter can enforce, or at least warn you about, accessibility violations. I immediately downloaded deque’s axe Accessibility Linter plugin for VSCode and it’s already caught a few things on this here blog. (I may have forgotten alt text in a few places…)

Accessibility is much more than automated tools. A site could pass the linter and pass all kinds of other tests and still be difficult to use. But this is one new tool in my toolbox that I didn’t know about before, and I’m glad to have it.

Watch Abbey’s talk for yourself on Youtube.