Purple HATS FAQs

Check out the GovTech A11y Team’s Tiny Accessibility Guide. This simple guide will help kickstart your journey to make digital services more inclusive and accessible.

You can share your feedback and suggestions for Puple HATS with the GovTech A11y Team through this form.

Purple HATS tests for the accessibility issues of websites by scanning the semantic HTML. It identifies areas where accessibility improvements can and should be made. It uses the axe-core engine by Deque Systems that checks against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 rules.

WCAG is a set of standards and recommendations to make web content more accessible for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs). There are several layers to WCAG: Principles, Guidelines, Success Criterias, and Level of Conformance.

It follows the 4 main principles of POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. POUR is further broken down into 13 guidelines which has success criteria to determine whether the guidelines are met according to 3 levels of conformance, namely A, AA, and AAA.

No, it will not be considered fully accessible.

Purple HATS is an automated accessibility testing tool. For a website to be fully accessible, it is crucial to run comprehensive accessibility assessments to identify issues early — this involves both automated and manual testing, especially with individuals with access needs.

For more information on manual accessibility testing, do reach out to the GovTech A11y Team here.

Manual testing refers to the process of evaluating and assessing the accessibility of a digital product or website through manual inspection and interaction.

It is an important process which fills in the gap that automated tools cannot capture, such as the user experience of navigating a site using assistive technology, or bugs that surface upon human interaction.

Hence, manual testing involves human testers who are proficient in carefully examining the various components and features of the digital platform to identify accessibility barriers and issues that may affect users who use assistive technologies to interact with digital products, and who may inadvertently face barriers when using digital services.

For more information on manual accessibility testing, do reach out to the GovTech A11y Team here.

Yes, Purple HATS can scan any website that can be accessed from your laptop or from your CI/CD tool. It can also scan post-login flows, using the Custom Flow feature.

The Custom Flow feature allows you to record your steps to login and perform any form actions (typing into form fields, clicks, button presses etc). Purple HATS will then take what you have recorded, to re-play the steps and scan the accessibility of each page.

If you have or are planning to code automated end-to-end test suites in JavaScript frameworks such as Cypress or Playwright, you can easily include automated accessibility testing with Purple HATS integration as an npm module in your project. You may refer to this guide for step-by-step instructions.

Yes, you can now do so via the Purple HATS Desktop App, which allows users to use a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to easily scan and download the Purple HATS report for their scanned website.

The latest release of the Purple HATS Desktop App can be found here.

Yes, using the Custom Flow method, Purple HATS will scan the website based on the interactions initiated by the user.

Any dynamically generated HTML elements from interactions such as onClick events (e.g. when a button is clicked) will also be scanned and included in the report.

Yes. For further instructions on how to integrate Purple HATS, please refer to this guide.

Depending on the speed of your machine, and the site you are scanning, it can scan upwards of 1,000 pages in less than 5 minutes.

However, do take note that some sites may rate limit or and throttle the speed of your scan. To address this, there is an option for you to limit the number of pages to scan.

For more information on how to limit the number of pages to scan, please refer to this step.

1. Use the Desktop App

The desktop app can be used to scan your development/production environment via an easy-to-use GUI. To get started, download the latest release here.

2. Through your CI/CD tool

- Check this page
- Review the Dockerfile and GitLab template (gitlab-pipeline-template.yml)
- Build and run the template to your pipeline

Yes, you can now run Purple HATS on your GSIB for testing intranet websites.

For more information on how to get started, please reach out to the GovTech A11y Team here.

You may need to use an internet-facing device to run Purple HATS.