AccessLint vs Pa11y

AccessLint checks accessibility during development, on pull requests, and on live sites. Its WCAG 2.2 engine has 95 rules and a stated 53ms median audit across 5,000 real-world sites. Pull-request reviews inspect changed files and leave inline comments with the relevant rule and a suggested correction, but do not fail builds or block merges. Deploy-triggered scans require Starter or Pro, run asynchronously, and also do not synchronously fail builds. Saved user journeys can run daily, with email alerts for new violations or changes against a baseline. The toolkit provides checks for Playwright, Vitest, and Storybook, while pull-request reviews use a GitHub App. Starter and Pro include shareable read-only evidence reports with before-and-after screenshots of affected elements. Free covers public-repository pull-request reviews, one daily monitored flow, and violation trends. Starter costs $19 a month or $190 a year; Pro costs $349 a month or $3,490 a year. AccessLint says automated checks alone cannot make a site compliant.

Pa11y is a free, open-source set of tools for checking website accessibility. Its command-line interface loads a page for a one-off test and highlights issues, while Pa11y CI checks a list of pages in continuous-integration workflows. Pa11y Dashboard tests pages daily and graphs improvements or regressions over time. Pa11y Webservice supplies JSON data for the Dashboard or a custom dashboard-style front end. The package runs from the command line or Node.js, uses HTML_CodeSniffer by default, and can also use the axe test runner. WCAG2AA is the default CLI standard, with WCAG2A and WCAG2AAA selectable. Reports can be human-readable CLI output, CSV, HTML, JSON, or TSV. Configuration uses command-line options or JSON and JavaScript files, and local HTML files can be tested with an absolute path. Pa11y provides API access, scheduled scans, site-level scanning, and CI/CD integration across Linux, macOS, Windows, web, API, and self-hosted setups. Pa11y 10 requires Node.js 22.13.0 or newer on an even-numbered release.