Accessibility Dashboard — Complete Guide

In this tutorial, you will learn about Accessibility Dashboard. We cover key concepts, practical examples, and best practices to help you master this topic.

An accessibility dashboard aggregates automated scan results from axe-core, Lighthouse, and Pa11y into a single view, tracking scores over time, identifying trend changes, and alerting teams when accessibility metrics drop below configured thresholds.

What You'll Learn

You will design an accessibility dashboard, collect scan results from multiple tools, visualize trends with charts, set up alert thresholds, and integrate with CI/CD pipelines for real-time updates.

Why It Matters

Without a dashboard, accessibility metrics are scattered across CI logs, manual reports, and email notifications. A centralized dashboard gives teams a single source of truth for accessibility health and makes trends visible to everyone.

Real-World Use

A platform team runs daily accessibility scans on 50 Microservices. The dashboard shows that one service's Lighthouse score dropped from 92 to 74 after a deployment. The team investigates and finds a new component library introduced contrast issues.

Dashboard Architecture

flowchart TD
  A[Data Sources] --> B[Collection Layer]
  B --> C[Storage]
  C --> D[Visualization]
  D --> E[Alerts]
  A1[axe-core CLI] --> B
  A2[Lighthouse CI] --> B
  A3[Pa11y] --> B
  E --> F[Slack]
  E --> G[Email]

Building a Dashboard

Collect results from automated tools and store them in a time-series database. Build a frontend with charts showing score trends over time.

// Data collection script
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');

async function collectMetrics() {
  const results = {
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
    url: process.env.URL,
    tools: {}
  };

  // Run axe-core
  const axeResult = execSync(`npx axe ${process.env.URL} --json`);
  const axeData = JSON.parse(axeResult);
  results.tools.axe = {
    violations: axeData.violations.length,
    critical: axeData.violations.filter(v => v.impact === 'critical').length,
    serious: axeData.violations.filter(v => v.impact === 'serious').length,
    passes: axeData.passes.length
  };

  // Run Lighthouse
  const lhResult = execSync(`lighthouse ${process.env.URL} --output=json --quiet`);
  const lhData = JSON.parse(lhResult);
  results.tools.lighthouse = {
    score: Math.round(lhData.categories.accessibility.score * 100)
  };

  // Save to storage
  fs.writeFileSync(
    path.join(__dirname, 'data', `${Date.now()}.json`),
    JSON.stringify(results, null, 2)
  );
}

<!-- Dashboard component -->
<div class="dashboard">
  <header class="dashboard-header">
    <h1>Accessibility Dashboard</h1>
    <div class="overall-score">Score: 92</div>
    <div class="trend">Trend: +3 this week</div>
  </header>
  <section class="tool-metrics">
    <div class="metric-card">
      <h2>axe-core</h2>
      <div class="violation-count">5 violations</div>
      <div class="violation-breakdown">
        <span class="critical">2 critical</span>
        <span class="serious">2 serious</span>
        <span class="moderate">1 moderate</span>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="metric-card">
      <h2>Lighthouse</h2>
      <div class="score">Score: 94</div>
    </div>
  </section>
  <section class="chart">
    <canvas id="trendChart"></canvas>
  </section>
</div>

/* Dashboard styling */
.dashboard {
  font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
  max-width: 1200px;
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 2rem;
}

.metric-card {
  background: #f8f9fa;
  border: 1px solid #dee2e6;
  border-radius: 8px;
  padding: 1.5rem;
  margin: 1rem 0;
}

.critical { color: #dc3545; }
.serious { color: #fd7e14; }
.moderate { color: #ffc107; }

Common Mistakes

• Tracking only Lighthouse scores without violation details
• Not storing historical data for trend analysis
• Alerting on every minor change causing alert fatigue
• Building a dashboard only for technical audiences
• Not integrating dashboard data with incident management
• Forgetting to track which URLs and pages are scanned
• Using inconsistent data formats across tools

Practice and Challenge

Practice 1: Design a data model for storing accessibility scan results. Practice 2: Create a script that runs axe-core and Lighthouse and saves results. Practice 3: Build a simple HTML dashboard showing current metrics. Practice 4: Add a trend chart showing score changes over time. Practice 5: Configure an alert that fires when critical violations appear.

Challenge: Build a complete accessibility dashboard for a 5-page site. Collect data from axe-core, Lighthouse, and Pa11y daily for one week. Visualize trends with at least three chart types (score over time, violation breakdown, tool comparison). Set up Slack alerts for critical violations.

FAQ

Mini Project

Build a dashboard for tracking accessibility across three environments: development, staging, and production. Collect scores from Lighthouse CI for each environment daily. Show a comparison view and highlight the environment with the most issues. Add weekly email reports to stakeholders.

What's Next

Testing Module Project covers the capstone project for the testing module.