A proactive alternative to the CWAC monitoring programme

A11y Pulse helps you find accessibility issues across your whole website and fix the ones that matter most.

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What is the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC)?

The Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC) is an automated web accessibility testing tool created by the New Zealand Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO). Starting in June 2025, GCDO have been running the CWAC monitoring programme which runs quarterly accessibility tests against government websites, and makes the results public. This is a fantastic move and will hopefully provide much-needed motivation for government digital teams to take accessibility seriously.

While the CWAC monitoring programme is a step in the right direction, it has three main limitations:

  1. Tests are only run quarterly. For fast-moving teams and for websites that frequently update their content, quarterly tests do not provide a feedback loop that is short enough to address accessibility issues before they affect the general population.
  2. To avoid excessive resource use, the CWAC monitoring programme will only scan up to 100 pages per website, and these pages will be randomly selected every time. This will introduce inconsistencies between quarterly reports, and make it difficult to track progress over time. Essentially any website with more than 100 pages will have a moving accessibility target.
  3. Results are published as CSV files. Teams must manually retrieve and review the results, which can be difficult and time consuming with such a basic file format. These constraints mean there is little motivation to share accessibility testing results around the team, and getting management buy-in requires significant effort.

How does A11y Pulse differ from CWAC?

A11y Pulse runs all of the same checks as CWAC, thanks to its use of axe-core under the hood. The main benefit of testing your site with A11y Pulse is that it uses daily snapshots to give you continuous accessibility testing over your entire site. Rather than being limited to a random sample of 100 pages, A11y Pulse can automatically test every page on your website (although you can limit what is tested if you prefer). This gives you a consistent overview of how your accessibility score is tracking over time.

The simple web interface allows every person in your team to have their own login. Reports can be periodically sent via email, showing a comparison of your latest tests versus the previous time period. You can even set up alerting via email, Slack, or Teams so that you know when accessibility regressions occur. This feature is a powerful tool to ensure your users are not adversely affected by accessibility issues, and helps you make sure you are always meeting the NZ Web Accessibility Standard.

Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC)

  • Price: Free
  • Testing Frequency: Quarterly
  • Automation: Scans 100 pages at random from a domain
  • Reporting: Results published to data.govt.nz after scanning
  • Best For: New Zealand government agencies who are only passively monitoring accessibility

A11y Pulse

  • Price: Starts at $19 USD /month
  • Testing Frequency: Daily (unlimited manual rescans)
  • Automation: Can crawl your site or read your sitemap to scan all pages, or test selected URLs
  • Reporting: Simple web UI for drilling into results, weekly reports, and instant regression alerts via email, Slack, or Teams
  • Best For: New Zealand government agencies who want to proactively monitor accessibility to ensure continuous compliance with the Web Accessibility Standard 1.2

This page was last updated on . The information presented here about A11y Pulse and CWAC is for illustration purposes and may not be up-to-date as products change over time.