Your reports can now check every page with two accessibility engines instead of one. Alongside Axe Core, Rocket Validator runs AccessLint Core on every page it crawls. It's a public beta, and you can switch it on today.
You are not meant to pick a winner. Two engines checking the same page will sometimes disagree, and those disagreements turn out to be the most useful thing in the report.
Three engines, one crawl
Every time Rocket Validator crawls your site, it runs each page through three validation engines: the W3C Nu validator for HTML and inline CSS, and Axe Core and AccessLint Core for accessibility. One crawl, all three sets of results.
The two accessibility engines are the pair worth comparing. They check the same rendered pages against the same standard, the WCAG success criteria, but each has its own ruleset and its own reading of the cases that sit close to the line. Your report keeps both sets of results side by side, so you are always looking at the same pages checked two ways.
When both engines agree, start there
When Axe Core and AccessLint Core independently flag the same problem on the same element, you can stop wondering and start fixing. Two engines built by different teams, working from different rulesets, landing on the same answer is about as strong as automated evidence gets. Those go to the top of your list.
When they disagree, look closer
The engines will not always agree, and that is the part we find genuinely interesting. Each one implements the WCAG rules in its own way, so one may catch something the other misses, or read a borderline case differently. AccessLint Core flags password fields that block password managers, which Axe Core does not. Axe Core flags pointer target size, which AccessLint Core does not.
A disagreement is a prompt to go and look, usually by hand. It might be a real issue that only one engine detects, or a case where the right answer depends on context no automated tool can see. Either way, it points you at the handful of elements that actually need a person.
More coverage, same workflow
Adding an engine does not add work. All three run from the same crawl, and the report keeps their results separate, so you can read them together or focus on one. When both accessibility engines flag the same underlying problem, fixing the page clears it in both at once.
Turning it on
Turn on Check Accessibility with AccessLint when you create a report, and both accessibility engines will run on the same crawl. AccessLint Core costs 1 credit per checked page, the same as every other engine, so a page checked by all three costs 3 credits.
If you want the longer version, we wrote two pages about it: what AccessLint Core is and what it checks, and how it compares with Axe Core. And when you hit an issue you are not sure how to fix, we write remediation guides for both engines: browse the AccessLint guides and the Axe Core guides.
This is a public beta, so please tell us what you find. If the two engines disagree somewhere and you cannot work out which one is right, that is exactly the kind of thing we want to hear about: write to us at support@rocketvalidator.com.
