Open-source attributions

The rule engine at the centre of every scan is axe-core, an open-source accessibility testing library published by Deque Systems under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Reachcanon uses it unmodified. The licence text ships inside the package and is available at mozilla.org/MPL/2.0.

IT IS NOT PART OF ANY DIRECTIVE. axe-core is a tool, not a legal instrument. No EU directive names it, endorses it, or requires it. The normative requirements are WCAG 2.1 level AA and, through it, EN 301 549 — axe-core is simply one well-regarded implementation of automated checks against some of those criteria, and any other engine could be used in its place. Saying otherwise would lend a commercial library an authority it does not have.

Some findings do not come from axe-core. Where the rule engine cannot resolve a contrast ratio — text over a gradient, most often — Reachcanon measures the rendered pixels and decides the check itself. Those findings say so in their text, so a reader can tell which engine produced which result.

Pages are loaded in Chromium driven by Playwright, both published by Microsoft under the Apache License 2.0. The browser is what makes it possible to test what a person's browser would actually render, rather than what the HTML implies.