03 · Research
Accessibility research
The studio's research arm is being built in the open: automated WCAG scans of Maine nonprofit, municipal, and campaign websites, published in aggregate. No report has shipped yet — the pipeline is being stood up and tested against our own site first, and this page will say so until that changes. The point, once it does, is not to shame individual organizations — it's to document, with receipts, how much of Maine's civic web is closed to disabled people, and to make fixing it easier than ignoring it.
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; it cannot tell you the alt text is useless. It can find a form field with no label; it cannot tell you the form is impossible to complete with a screen reader.
A clean automated scan does not mean a site is accessible. It means the site passed the checks a machine can run. We publish automated findings because they are consistent, repeatable, and a reliable floor — not because they are the whole story. Any vendor telling you otherwise is selling something.
We treat this limitation as part of the methodology, not a footnote. Reports state what was tested, what wasn't, and what a "pass" does and doesn't mean.
We eat the dog food
Every change to this site goes through the same automated pass the Maine-wide scans will 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
/supportaxe: 0 violations
/support/requestaxe: 0 violations
/aboutaxe: 0 violations
/contactaxe: 0 violations
PASS — zero violations, 8/8 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
- Aggregate findings; organizations notified before anything site-specific is published
After the scan
Scanning is the diagnosis. When reports start publishing, if your organization's site shows up in one — or you'd rather fix things before it does — remediation is exactly the kind of work our tech support side exists for. For qualifying Maine organizations, it's free.