Alfa vs Assistiv Labs

Alfa is a free, open accessibility testing engine for websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It checks pages against accessibility standards such as WCAG, using included rules or pluggable rules in the ACT Rules Format. Developers can add custom rules and filter results by conformance level or WCAG version. Audit output follows the Evaluation and Report Language schema as JSON-LD, and the command-line interface can audit a single page and save results as JSON. Scraper and crawler tools create page representations and discover pages across a site or subdomain. Ready-made integrations cover frameworks and test tools including Angular, React, Vue, Cypress, Jest, Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and WebdriverIO. Alfa is distributed as separate npm packages under the MIT license. It runs in ECMAScript 2022-compatible JavaScript environments, including recent Node.js and browser versions. Building from source requires Node.js 20 or later and Yarn. The project says most integrations are experimental and may change; older environments may be targetable from source but are not explicitly supported.

Assistiv Labs connects users remotely to real assistive technologies so they can test websites and apps through a modern web browser. It covers WCAG 2.2 and lists manual review tools, mobile testing, automated scans, CI/CD integration, and remediation guidance. Available technologies vary by plan and include NVDA, Narrator, JAWS, VoiceOver, Android TalkBack, Windows High Contrast, Edge Reader mode, Windows Reduce Motion, Windows Screen Magnifier, and ZoomText/Fusion. Sessions start clean and stay within the browser tab. Debugging tools include Chrome DevTools, inspect.exe, and Xcode Accessibility Inspector. AssistivTunnel provides a secure connection for testing localhost, VPN-protected, and intranet sites. New accounts receive a 14-day Professional trial for one user without a credit card, with sessions limited to 10 minutes each. Freelancer costs $19 a month and includes 120 testing minutes monthly; Professional costs $99 a month with unlimited testing minutes. The company plan has unlimited users and minutes, with price not listed. The company says it holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and a SOC 2 Type 2 attestation for Security criteria.