chore: replace Playwright/axe a11y tests with pa11y-ci-action

[John McCall (lowlydba)]

Pull Request

Closes #549

Replaces the custom Playwright + axe-core accessibility test with lowlysre/pa11y-ci-action, pinned to the v1.0.0 commit SHA. The old test needed its own static file server, a browser install step, and two devDependencies. Now, all we need is a light config file! This hoists a lot of boilerplate that we don't need for this project.

The scan keeps the same 7 pages and uses the axe runner with the WCAG2AA standard. pa11y maps that standard to the WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 A/AA axe tags only, so the check is now scoped to WCAG 2.1 AA. The old test also ran wcag22aa, and pa11y has no way to enable it. The CI job is renamed to match.

The CI job serves the built site with docusaurus serve on port 3000 and waits for it before scanning. --no-sandbox is set in the config because Chromium's sandbox is blocked on ubuntu-latest.

Removes __tests__/a11y.test.mjs, the test:a11y script, and the playwright / @axe-core/playwright devDependencies.

Testing

The accessibility job passed on the earlier CI run. The latest push only renames the job, and I didn't run the scan locally or confirm the job fails on a page with real violations.

[github-actions]

✅MegaLinter analysis: Success

Descriptor	Linter	Files	Fixed	Errors	Max errors	Warnings	Elapsed time
✅ JAVASCRIPT	eslint	28		0		0	22.22s
✅ MARKDOWN	markdownlint	285		0		0	0.5s
✅ SQL	sqlfluff	79		0		0	6.1s

See detailed reports in MegaLinter artifacts

Your project could benefit from a custom flavor, which would allow you to run only the linters you need, and thus improve runtime performances. (Skip this info by defining FLAVOR_SUGGESTIONS: false)

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[github-actions]

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🕐 Updated	Oct 02, 2026 19:33 UTC
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[Copilot]

Copilot review overview

🟡 Changes recommended

The pa11y configuration omits WCAG 2.2-specific axe rules that the previous test executed.

Review effort: Balanced
Findings: 1

Open (1)

• WCAG2AA runner omits WCAG 2.2 AA coverage · New

What changed in this PR

Replaces the custom Playwright accessibility suite with pa11y CI for issue #549.

Changes:

• Adds pa11y configuration for seven pages.
• Updates CI to serve and scan the built site.
• Removes Playwright/axe dependencies and tests.

File	Description
.pa11yci.json	Defines accessibility scan settings and URLs.
.github/​workflows/​ci.yml	Runs pa11y against the built site.
package.json	Removes obsolete script and dependencies.
package-lock.json	Removes corresponding locked packages.
__tests__/​a11y.test.mjs	Deletes the replaced test implementation.

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[Alex Iannicelli (atiannicelli)]

Seems like a positive.