Pa11y check passes locally, fails in Github Actions about pa11y HOT 3 CLOSED

Hi @btylerburton,

Pa11y-ci should definitely run in GH actions. Assuming the linked PR above is for the project you're having issues with, and this is an example of the failing GH action, it looks to me like it's most likely an issue with the actions script.

If I'm reading the code correctly, for a build:

• The build script runs the assets:build script and an eleventy build
• The assets:build script writes the static assets to the eleventy output folder (_site/assets/), and writes the file locations to _data/assetPaths.json. The _data/assetPaths.json is saved in the git repository, but the other assets are not.
• The eleventy templates use the data from assetPaths to reference the appropriate files (in this case styles.css)

In accessibility_scan.yml:

• The steps include the standard checkout and install Node, then runs npm install and npm run pa11y-ci:gh
• The pa11y-ci:gh script run the start script, which performs an eleventy build and starts the server. The _data/assetPaths.json is in the git repository, so those CSS file locations are written to output HTML files. But, the CSS assets themselves are not in the git repo, and nothing in the eleventy config or script appears to call ./config/buildAssets.js.
• Then the pa11y-ci script runs and fails because the pages aren't loading the CSS files.

I expect if you do a fresh clone of the repository and run the specific action steps, the page you open will show that it's failing to load the CSS. So, it looks like you need to run the assets:build script before start and pa11y-ci.

from pa11y.

Oh wow! Thanks for the detailed answer @aarongoldenthal. Pa11y is now reporting the same in CI as it is in my local, so I'm going to close this issue.

from pa11y.

Glad it helped @btylerburton

from pa11y.