The Good Citizens check: look at what you just shipped

Can everyone use it? Was it worth the wait? Can people read it comfortably? Can machines tell what it is?

People runs axe-core, the open-source accessibility engine from Deque that Google’s Lighthouse has used since 2017³, against the rules of WCAG 2.2. Speed reads the browser’s own timing for this visit: when the main content appeared, how much the layout jumped, how much was downloaded and from how many other companies, and which images were far larger than shown. Type measures the rendered text: paragraphs smaller than 16 pixels, lines longer than about 85 characters, cramped leading, and how many sizes the page uses. Structure looks at what search engines and assistants read: headings, landmarks, title, description, share cards, JSON-LD and microformats.

Nothing leaves the page. The check runs in your browser, and the report is yours to copy.

Automatic checks are a start, never a finish.

In 2017 the UK government’s accessibility team built a page with 143 deliberate barriers and ran ten tools over it. The best single tool found 41%⁵; all ten together found 71%, and 42 barriers were missed by every one. Deque reports that automatic testing finds about 57%⁶ of issues by volume, because the common ones are so common. A perfect Lighthouse score does not mean a page is accessible.

Speed is measured once, on your machine and your connection, which are probably better than most of your readers’. And some sites forbid outside scripts; on those, the bookmark says so and stops. Use the check, then use the keyboard tool and the screen reader view, then watch real people use the page.

The check works out what kind of page it is on before it reports. On a live page, or a prototype built as one, it runs everything.

On a design drawn as a picture, such as a Figma prototype link, it switches to its Picture tab. Your browser asks to share the tab, once, and the check reads the pixels for text that may be too faint and colours that look the same to someone colour-blind. Both are estimates, and they are marked on the screen so you can look. Structure and type wait until it is built.

When the content is in a frame from another site, as in many app builders and Storybook, it offers to open the frame on its own. In a design tool’s editor, it suggests opening the prototype or preview link instead.