You can configure accessibility checks based on the rules and tags that are most relevant to your team. This article identifies the default configuration for accessibility checks and the available options for customizing accessibility checks based on your team's goals.
Without any changes on your part, accessibility checks use the default configuration from axe-core. This configuration uses all rules outlined here, except for rules with the "experimental" tag. The default configuration includes:
- All rules for WCAG 2.0 (levels A, AA, AAA)
- All rules for WCAG 2.1 (levels A, AA, AAA)
- Best Practices rules
Advanced settings
Toggle on Advanced settings to configure custom rules and tags that are most relevant to your team, whether that's WCAG 2.1 Level A & AA, best practices rules, and more. For example, if your organization was working towards WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance, you can specifically use the wcag2aa tag.
Advanced settings
Tags
Tags only include the specific rules for that accessibility standard and do not include any rules in less strict standards. For example, if you want an accessibility check to cover rules from WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance and WCAG 2.0 Level A compliance, you need to list both tags in the accessibility check: "wcag2a, wcag2aa".
The following table identifies accessibility standards for different tag names. For additional information on the axe-core tags, please refer to this resource.
Tag Name | Accessibility Standard |
wcag2a | WCAG 2.0 Level A |
wcag2aa | WCAG 2.0 Level AA |
wcag2aaa | WCAG 2.0 Level AAA |
wcag21aa | WCAG 2.1 Level AA |
wcag22aa | WCAG 2.2 Level AA |
best-practice | Common accessibility best practices |
wcag*** | WCAG success criterion. For example, wcag111 maps to SC 1.1.1 |
ACT | W3C approved Accessibility Conformance Testing rules |
section508 | Old Section 508 rules |
section508.*.* | Requirement in old Section 508 |
experimental | Cutting-edge rules, disabled by default |
Rules
Rules allow you to further customize an accessibility check based on what is most important to your organization. Depending on the situation, you can configure an accessibility check to include or exclude specific rules. For example, you can ensure that all images have alternate text by including the area-alt rule ID. See the full list of rule descriptions here for additional information.
Bypass CORS
By default, accessibility checks that target the page or the current frame do not scan iframes that have CORS disabled. To evaluate every iframe in the accessibility check, even if CORS is disabled in the iframe, toggle on Bypass CORS in advanced settings.
When Bypass CORS is enabled, rules disabled under Disable certain rules are only applied to the main frame, not to iframes.
If you wish to disable certain rules for iframes with Bypass CORS enabled, add them as a comma-separated list to the Disable these rules on all iframes input. For example, if the page includes a third-party iframe that violates the color-contrast
rule, you can configure the check to exclude the color-contrast
rule for iframes.