
journal / making-a11y-cat-trustworthy
Making A11Y Cat Trustworthy
What I learned while debugging an accessibility scanner with AI agents, and why evidence matters more than pass/fail theatre.
- Published
- Apr 28, 2026
- Read time
- 24 mins
Category
Web app projects, developer tools, browser-based experiments, interface details, and practical notes from building and testing software.

journal / making-a11y-cat-trustworthy
What I learned while debugging an accessibility scanner with AI agents, and why evidence matters more than pass/fail theatre.

journal / why-im-not-building-a11y-cat-around-paid-accessibility-apis
A practical look at WAVE API, axe-core, Playwright, Pa11y, IBM Equal Access, and why a local scanner is the more honest foundation for A11Y CAT.
journal / cat-crawler-why-i-built-it-what-i-learned
Why I built Cat Crawler, what it is good at, what it taught me, and the improvements I would make next.

journal / a11y-cat-agents-workflow-best-practices-for-developers
What it takes to use agents without letting the work slip into vague claims, fake certainty, or sloppy release habits.

journal / a11y-cat-25-what-this-project-is-now
A plain account of where the project stands now, what it can actually prove, and where the limits still are.

journal / a11y-cat-24-governing-the-work-as-hard-as-the-code
Why the project started leaning harder on rules, release discipline, and explicit boundaries instead of good intentions.

journal / a11y-cat-23-packaging-and-handoff-tooling
Packaging, release handoff, and build cleanup stopped being side work once the project got big enough to ship properly.

journal / a11y-cat-22-cutting-seams-into-the-runtime
This was probably inevitable. The only question was whether I was going to admit it early enough. By mid-April, A11Y Cat’s runtime had become too large…

journal / a11y-cat-16-language-headings-and-structure
These are the kinds of features that sound small until you try to make them useful on real pages without being annoying. Language, headings, and structure…

journal / a11y-cat-21-measuring-detection-quality
This was a big shift in what “tested” meant to me. There is a difference between testing that a tool runs and testing that it keeps…