Accessible web testing with Playwright and Axe Core

This is the third article in a series on accessibility testing for QA engineers. The first one covered Cypress with axe-core and went into why accessibility testing matters, what the 2025 WebAIM Million report found, and the legal landscape around ADA and the European Accessibility Act. The second explored wick-a11y as an alternative Cypress plugin with built-in HTML reporting. This article adapts every example to Playwright using @axe-core/playwright , Deque's official integration. The accessibility concepts are identical. The code is different. Introducing the tools Playwright is a cross-browser testing framework from Microsoft. It runs tests against Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, handles auto-waiting natively, and has had keyboard methods ( page.keyboard.press() ) since its first release. No plugin needed for that. Playwright added locator.ariaSnapshot() in v1.49, which captures the accessibility tree as structured YAML. Version 1.59 promoted it to a page-level method ( page.ariaSna