Accessibility
axe-core on each monitored page, in a real browser, contrast included — a score, the defects with the offending element, the trend.
Updated on 5 October 2026
On this page
The Accessibility page (Project → Monitoring → Accessibility) audits your pages with axe-core, the reference engine for accessibility audits: a score per page, each defect with the HTML excerpt of the offending element and the link to the rule, and the score over time.
What PostShip does
The audit
Once a day, and right after a deployment, PostShip opens each page in a browser, waits for it to finish rendering, and runs axe-core on it with all its rules. The pages: the project's home, then the monitored HTTP URLs by age, up to 3 with Discover, 10 with Pro, 50 with Pro Plus.
What the audit sees: the colour contrast between text and its background, images without alternative text, fields without a label, mute buttons and links, missing language, misassembled ARIA roles, heading order, iframes without a title, blocked zoom, touch target size… about a hundred rules, on the page as a visitor sees it, JavaScript included.
The browser runs on its own, on a PostShip server, with no access to your accounts or to anything but the public page. When it is busy, the audit falls back to the served HTML: the rules that need rendering, contrast included, are then set aside, never counted as violations.
The score
Per page: 100, minus 15 points per violated critical rule, 10 per serious rule, 5 per moderate rule, 2 per minor rule. It counts per rule, not per element: 10 images without alt are one template defect, not 10 defects. Floor zero. The project's score is the average of the pages.
The detail
Each violation unfolds: the rule's description, up to 5 offending elements with their HTML, the total count, and the link to the rule at Deque. The most common rules have their sentence in your language; the others keep axe-core's help text.
Settings
Nothing to set. “Audit now”, at the top of the page, runs the audit right away (at most once every 10 minutes), from Pro; on Discover, the audit runs once a day. The audited pages are those of the URLs page: add a page there to audit it.
What triggers an alert
Nothing: the audit is there to read, page by page, and to fix. A page that no longer renders at all is a matter for checkout journeys, which do alert.
Limits and plans
| Discover | Pro | Pro Plus | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The audit, daily and after a deploy | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| “Audit now” | — | Yes | Yes |
| Audited pages per project | 3 | 10 | 50 |
See plans.
Troubleshooting
“Not audited: this is not an HTML page”
The URL returns something other than HTML (a JSON, an image, a PDF): there is nothing to audit.
“Not audited: the audit exceeded… seconds”
A very heavy page exceeds the allotted time. The next pass tries again; if it exceeds every time, lighten it or remove it from the audited URLs.
A contrast defect I cannot see
axe-core measures the text against the computed background colour. Text laid over an image or a gradient may be counted “inconclusive” rather than failing; light grey text on white does fail below a 4.5:1 ratio (3:1 for large text).