03 · Research
Accessibility research
The studio's research arm runs automated WCAG scans of Maine nonprofit, municipal, and campaign websites and publishes the findings in aggregate. Report 001, on the homepages of Maine's 25 largest municipalities, is out. We're not in this to shame anyone. A documented problem gets budgeted and fixed; an undocumented one stays broken, and Maine's civic web has gone undocumented for a long time.
What automated scanning actually finds
Read this before you read any report
Automated tools detect only a portion of WCAG issues, roughly a third to a half depending on the tooling and who's doing the measuring. A scanner can tell you an image has no alt text, but not that the alt text is useless. It can find an unlabeled form field, but it has no idea the whole form is impossible to finish with a screen reader.
A clean automated scan means the site passed the checks a machine can run, and nothing more. We publish automated findings because they're consistent and repeatable, and because a floor is still useful. Any vendor telling you otherwise is selling something.
The limitation is part of the methodology. Every report states what was tested, what wasn't, and what a "pass" means.
We eat the dog food
Every change to this site goes through the same automated pass the Maine-wide scans use, plus keyboard, zoom, and reflow checks a scanner can't do. Zero violations is the bar, and per the section above, we still don't call that proof.
$ node scripts/a11y-check.mjs
/axe: 0 violations
/projectsaxe: 0 violations
/scansaxe: 0 violations
/scans/reportsaxe: 0 violations
/scans/reports/001…axe: 0 violations
/supportaxe: 0 violations
/support/requestaxe: 0 violations
/aboutaxe: 0 violations
/contactaxe: 0 violations
PASS — zero violations, 9/9 routes
Tooling
The scan pipeline is built on established open-source tooling: axe-core, Pa11y, and Lighthouse are the candidates under evaluation. When the first reports publish, this section will describe the exact pipeline: tools, versions, rulesets, and crawl scope, so anyone can reproduce our results.
- Standard
- WCAG 2.2, Level AA baseline
- Scope
- Public-facing pages of Maine nonprofit, municipal, and campaign sites
- Publication
- Sites named with per-site violation counts; element-level detail stays private and is shared free with any site's operators on request
After the scan
Scanning is the diagnosis. If your organization's site shows up in a report, or you'd rather fix things before it does, remediation is exactly the kind of work our tech support side exists for. Findings are always free, to anyone who asks. Fixing them is free for Maine progressive organizations; municipalities, institutions, and businesses can hire Pinebit for that work at commercial rates.