Introduction

Access Engine was released in early 2017 and replaced all other legacy testing engines used by Level Access products. Access Continuum is a product released by Level Access that allows customers to integrate accessibility testing in their continuous integration (CI) process using Access Engine, a standalone JavaScript-based testing engine.

Access Continuum allows for integration of Access Engine with test automation frameworks, allowing accessibility tests to be run on code snippets, nodes of a page, or a fully-rendered page while an organization is running their other automated tests. Organizations can simply embed accessibility testing within their existing automated testing infrastructure and process, allowing development teams to resolve accessibility issues when they are much more cost-effective to fix -- before they are released to production. 

Future iterations of Access Continuum will include out-of-the-box integrations with other CI tools, allowing organizations to embed automated accessibility testing at various stages of their software development lifecycle -- at check-in, build, etc. 

Components and Features

Access Continuum currently includes: 

1. Access Engine. Note that the community edition of Access Continuum, available for download on Webaccessibility.com, includes the professional edition of Access Engine giving you access to the full suite of automatic tests available to Level Access customers (NOTE: The 'guided automatic' tests are not included with this). However, connection to AMP is not available for community edition and therefore some features may be limited -- such as Guided Automatic testing and evaluation and testing against customized organized testing controls. 
2. Sample Projects. In order to demonstrate to customers how to integrate accessibility testing into their existing automated testing process, a number of sample projects for popular test automation frameworks are included. These include sample helper files that show how to call our accessibility tests from within these automated testing tools. 

Currently, sample projects are available for the following frameworks: 

1. Continuum for Java:
   1. Cucumber / Selenium
   2. TestNG on Sauce Labs
   3. JUnit
2. Continuum for JavaScript:
   1. Jasmine / Karma
   2. CucumberJs / Selenium
   3. Protractor
   4. Jest
3. Continuum for Ruby
   1. Cucumber/Selenium
4. Continuum for Python:
   1. Robot Framework / Selenium
5. Continuum for Mobile:
   1. Appium - Android
   2. Appium - iOS