Best Practices

Best practices are accessibility techniques recommended by Deque that go beyond formal accessibility standards. These rules identify issues that, while not strictly required by WCAG or other specifications, can significantly improve the user experience for people with disabilities. Following best practices helps ensure higher-quality, more accessible web content even when formal methods are lacking or insufficient.

Default Value

When you don't specify a best practices override, axe Watcher uses the setting from your organization's global configuration. If best practices are enabled globally, they'll be included in your test results; if disabled globally, they won't appear unless you explicitly enable them via override.

Overriding

You can enable or disable best practices when your organization's global configuration permits this override. This is useful when you want to include additional checks beyond your required standard, or when you need to focus testing strictly on compliance requirements without best practice recommendations.

Available Options

• true - Enable best practice rules
• false - Disable best practice rules

JavaScript/TypeScript Example

const config = {
  axe: {
    apiKey: process.env.AXE_API_KEY,
    projectId: process.env.AXE_PROJECT_ID,
    configurationOverrides: {
      bestPractices: true
    }
  }
};

Java Example

ConfigurationOverrides overrides = new ConfigurationOverrides()
    .setEnableBestPractices(true);

AxeWatcherOptions options = new AxeWatcherOptions()
    .setApiKey(System.getenv("AXE_API_KEY"))
    .setProjectId(System.getenv("AXE_PROJECT_ID"))
    .setConfigurationOverrides(overrides);