Reduce accessibility compliance risk on every release

Accessibility tends to become urgent all at once. A customer reports that they cannot use your product. An advocacy group or regulator sends a demand letter. A new law takes effect, or a prospect makes accessible software a condition of the contract. Overnight, accessibility moves from a background concern to a question your leadership needs answered: how much risk are we carrying, how fast can we reduce it, and can we prove it?

Cypress Accessibility helps you answer that. It turns the Cypress tests you already run into detailed accessibility reports, so your team can find, prioritize, and fix issues without standing up a new testing program. There is no setup, no code change, and nothing new for your team to learn. If you already record test runs to Cypress Cloud, you can see results on the same day.

What accessibility risk actually looks like

For most teams, accessibility risk falls into three categories:

• Legal risk. Inaccessible digital products draw demand letters and lawsuits. In the United States, claims commonly cite the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and public-sector work is governed by Section 508. In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has been enforceable since June 2025 and applies to many companies that sell to EU customers, including businesses based outside the EU.
• Regulatory and procurement risk. Government contracts and enterprise buyers increasingly require evidence of accessibility conformance before they will sign. Without that evidence, you lose access to those deals.
• Brand and revenue risk. When people with disabilities cannot complete a purchase or a task, that is lost business and a reputation cost that compounds over time.

The common thread is that accessibility problems are cheapest to fix when you catch them early, and most expensive when you find them in an audit, a lawsuit, or a lost deal. The cost of not having a program is rarely zero. It is deferred, and it tends to arrive all at once.

You can start on day one, not after a setup project

If you are evaluating tools, you have probably found that most advice points to the same place: train your team, add accessibility plugins to your test suite, and standardize rulesets before you can see a single result. That work is real, and it happens before you have fixed anything for your customers. It gets you to the starting point holding a partial list of issues.

Cypress Accessibility takes a different path. The detecting and collecting happen for you, in Cypress Cloud, driven by your normal test runs. Page-level and component-level reports are generated automatically from every run. Those reports feed analytics over time, tooling for AI assistants, and full-page artifacts you can use to debug directly in the browser.

The result: from the first run, you can hold every build to an accessibility standard, with no specialized knowledge and no integration step.

What Cypress Accessibility checks, and what it does not

Cypress Accessibility checks for clear failures of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard most accessibility laws and audits are based on. By default it targets WCAG 2.1 AA, and you can tune it per project up to WCAG 2.2 at A, AA, and AAA conformance levels.

Under the hood, it runs Axe Core® by Deque Systems, the industry-standard rules engine, together with custom checks based on how your application actually behaves in your tests. For example, it can flag interactive elements that your tests click or type into but that use incorrect semantic markup, a problem static scans miss because they read the DOM as written rather than how it is used. Every state and variation your tests reach is checked, which adds up to thousands of checks per run that no one on your team had to write.

Automation cannot evaluate everything. Parts of WCAG require human judgment, which is why professional audits still matter. We are direct about this because it affects your planning: Cypress Accessibility is built to catch machine-detectable issues early, on every run, so your audits confirm quality instead of discovering debt.

Make audits confirm quality, not uncover a backlog

Automation alone does not make a product fully conformant, and it does not by itself establish legal compliance. Verification requires manual audits, which can take days or weeks and can surface large backlogs of urgent issues. Audits are essential. They should not be the first place you learn about accessibility problems.

If you run audits today, these patterns may be familiar:

• Unplanned scope. The audit produces more work than expected, against time already committed elsewhere.
• Rework. The audit reveals issues you thought were fixed, or new ones introduced while fixing something else.
• Late discoveries. The audit surfaces issues automation could have caught months earlier, when they were cheap to fix.

Many teams that use Cypress Accessibility also work with professional auditors, and they report fewer surprises and less disruption to their schedules. By catching machine-detectable issues on every run, they avoid stacking problems on top of problems, which is where the highest-effort fixes come from. That keeps delivery on track and keeps the product working better for customers between audits.

One view across your testing

Most teams assemble accessibility coverage from several independent tools: linting in the editor, generic checks inside end-to-end or component tests, accessibility-friendly locators, and custom assertions. Each lives in its own place, which makes it hard to trace an issue back to its cause.

Cypress Accessibility gives you one reporting structure across your component tests and your end-to-end tests in continuous integration (CI). You can cross-reference reports and follow an issue to its root cause in a single place: see a new violation, connect it to a specific run and commit, and trace it back to the change that introduced it. With Branch Review, you can compare two runs and see only the issues a given change introduced or resolved.

What this depends on

Cypress Accessibility is part of Cypress Cloud, our paid subscription. If you already record runs to Cypress Cloud, you can turn it on and see results with no change to your tests and no impact on test performance. Results appear in the reports your team already uses, and are available through an API and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for AI-assisted and automated workflows.