Open-source accessibility tooling
A web-based control centre for the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC) — run automated WCAG audits across whole site inventories, track compliance over time, and export results for reporting.
CWAC Admin is a management platform around the CWAC accessibility scanning engine developed by the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs. CWAC drives a real Chrome browser through your pages and runs axe-core and other audits against every page it visits.
The admin platform turns that engine into a usable product: a dashboard for your whole site inventory, configurable scan profiles, scheduling, compliance scoring, trend charts, and multi-user access control — all behind a secure login.
It was built for running accessibility programmes across many sites at once — the kind of centralised, repeatable checking that government and large organisations need to meet WCAG obligations.
A pluggable audit pipeline means CWAC's built-in checks (axe-core, language complexity, focus indicators and more) can be extended with custom plugins — including an SEO/AEO metadata audit shipped with this deployment that scores every page on search and answer-engine readiness.
Accounts are protected by TOTP two-factor authentication with recovery codes, and both the app and this site carry an opt-in cookie consent banner and privacy policy.
axe-core running inside real headless Chrome — catches issues that static analysis misses, across every page a scan config reaches.
CWAC's audit plugins (language complexity, focus indicators, heading structure and more) plus custom extensions.
A custom plugin scoring every scanned page on 12 search & answer-engine checks — title, meta description, canonical, headings, alt coverage, JSON-LD, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, language tag and link counts — with per-page scores and failed-check detail in scan reports, plus a per-site Metadata/AEO tab tracking an aggregate answer-engine score.
Register and organise the sites you manage, group them by organisation or programme, and scan them individually or in bulk.
Named configurations control page limits, thread counts, headless mode and which audit plugins run — from quick smoke tests to full-site audits.
Schedule recurring scans and keep full run history, so compliance is measured continuously rather than as a one-off snapshot. Live progress tracking shows running scans accurately through to completion.
Per-site accessibility scores, a cross-site leaderboard, WCAG conformance badges and trend charts over the last runs.
Results written as CSV and Parquet for BI tooling, with per-site and bulk report downloads straight from the UI.
Role-based user management, secure session auth, and a system status page for scanner, browser and service health.
TOTP two-factor authentication with recovery codes, opt-in cookie consent and a privacy policy — supporting GDPR obligations on both the app and this site.
Captured from the live deployment at cwac.civica11y.com.
github.com/sweddell/CWAC-ADMIN
Open source under BSD-3-Clause. The admin platform is Python/Flask served by gunicorn behind nginx; the CWAC engine (GPL-3.0, © NZ Department of Internal Affairs) is cloned separately at install time and invoked as a subprocess.
A running instance deployed on a Linux VPS, fronted by nginx with TLS. Access is login-restricted — get in touch below if you'd like a look inside.
Questions about the project, interested in running it yourself, or want access to the live instance? Send a message below — it goes straight to the maintainer's inbox.