Accessibility Agents 7.1: The Edit Gate on Every Client

Accessibility Agents 7.1: The Edit Gate on Every Client

Released 28 October 2026. Pull requests
#221 and
#225 to
#228.

Overview

7.1 is the release where installing the package does what the README says, on
every client. It comes from a full audit of the package against current
standards and each client's own documentation, checked against primary
sources, with every change reviewed by a second agent that had not seen it.
It also brings GitHub's
Open Source Accessibility Framework
into the package, as skills any repository can use, and into this project's own
practice.

Highlights

The Open Source Accessibility Framework

The framework sets out 24 actions, in four phases, for making accessibility part
of how an open source project works. 7.1 puts it to work in two ways.

• In the skills. Four new phase skills, osaf-foundational,
  osaf-workflow, osaf-testing and osaf-community, carry out the actions in
  any repository: all of them, one phase, or a single action. They keep the
  framework's own action IDs, cadences and Definitions of Done, open a tracking
  issue, and hand the hands-on parts to the package skills that do them, such
  as the web and markdown audits. Ask github-hub to "adopt the Open Source
  Accessibility Framework" to start. A reference skill,
  kb-open-source-accessibility-framework, holds the action index, pinned to a
  known framework version. See the framework guide.
• In this project. A new ACCESSIBILITY.md sets
  out what the project commits to: its priorities, what contributors are asked
  to do, how to report a barrier (an issue form, or privately by email), how
  severity is judged, and how quickly reports are answered and fixed. The pull
  request template now has an accessibility checklist, and
  CONTRIBUTING.md an accessibility section.

Routers can run their specialists

A live test found that the routers could not start their specialists: the
dispatch prompt gave a path relative to the package, and a subagent starts in
the user's project. Routers now send the absolute path to the skills folder,
on every client.

The edit gate works everywhere

Edits to user-facing files are refused until accessibility-lead has reviewed
the change.

• Claude Code: the gate used to lock edits for the whole session, because
  the lead runs as an inline skill and fires no stop event. It now opens when
  the lead loads through the Skill tool. Tested live, both ways.
• Codex: three faults, all fixed. Codex rejected the hooks file over a
  $comment key, so the gate never ran. Once it ran, it could not see which
  file a patch edits, because Codex sends the patch text rather than a path,
  so it allowed every edit; it now reads the patch's file headers. And it
  waited for a lead subagent to stop, which never happens when the lead runs
  inline, as it usually does; it now also opens when Codex reads the lead's
  SKILL.md, or when the prompt names $accessibility-lead. Tested against
  Codex's documented hook payloads; not yet in a live Codex session.
• Gemini CLI: the gate never opened, because it waited on AfterAgent,
  whose payload names no skill. It now opens when Gemini activates the lead
  with activate_skill.
• Antigravity (new): the gate opens when Antigravity reads the lead's
  SKILL.md. Tested against Antigravity's documented hook payloads; not yet in
  a live Antigravity session.
• Copilot CLI and VS Code: plugin hooks now ship where Agent Plugins 1.0
  looks for them.
• The stop hook can no longer loop, and its refusal gives the model a reason it
  can act on.

Plugin installs work

• Installing as a plugin used to load no hooks and no MCP server on any client.
  Both now load.
• The MCP server ships bundled as mcp-server/dist/stdio.mjs, so it starts
  from a plugin install with no npm install. A gate checks the bundle matches
  the source.
• plugin.json and mcp.json validate against the Agent Plugins 1.0 schemas.

New ways to install

• Gemini CLI extension: an archive attached to each release, with the
  skills, the hooks, AGENTS.md and the MCP server. Validated with Gemini CLI
  0.66.0; not yet tested in a live, signed-in Gemini session.
• The MCP server on npm and the MCP Registry:
  npx -y @community-access/accessibility-agents-mcp, listed as
  io.github.Community-Access/accessibility-agents. The package is the bundle
  alone, with no runtime dependencies; Playwright, axe and pdf-lib are optional.
• The Claude Code plugin now has an icon.

The scanners

• run_axe_scan never ran (it needs a page from a browser context). Fixed, and
  its findings use the standard WCAG form, such as 4.1.2 A.
• axe now runs the WCAG 2.2 rules, including 2.5.8 Target Size, which never ran
  before.
• Office and ePub scan configs now take effect.

Current standards, checked against the sources

All 108 skills and about 160 documents were checked against primary sources as
of October 2026, including:

• the ADA Title II and HHS Section 504 web rule dates,
• EN 301 549 V3.2.1 and V4.1.1 and their legal status,
• ISO/IEC 40500:2025, the latest WCAG 3 draft, VPAT 2.5Rev and PDF/UA-2,
• ARIA 1.2 and the APG patterns, axe-core 4.14, Lighthouse 13 and framework
  APIs.

Every report now uses one scoring model, the renderer's, and the skills that
describe scoring say what the reports compute.

Install

The table lists each client with its install commands.

Client	Install
Claude Code	/plugin marketplace add Community-Access/accessibility-agents, then /plugin install accessibility-agents@community-access
Copilot CLI	copilot plugin marketplace add Community-Access/accessibility-agents, then copilot plugin install accessibility-agents@community-access
VS Code	Chat: Install Plugin From Source, with https://github.com/Community-Access/accessibility-agents (needs chat.plugins.enabled)
Codex	codex plugin marketplace add Community-Access/accessibility-agents, then codex plugin add accessibility-agents@community-access for skills and scanners. Codex no longer loads plugin hooks, so for the edit gate use npm run setup from a checkout instead
Gemini CLI	gemini extensions install https://github.com/Community-Access/accessibility-agents (uses the extension archive attached to this release)
MCP server only	npx -y @community-access/accessibility-agents-mcp
Any client, from a checkout	npm run setup (add -- --dry-run to see what it will do first)

Removed

• The VS Code extension. The @a11y extension discovered
  .github/agents/*.agent.md files that 7.x no longer ships. VS Code installs
  the package natively as an agent plugin instead.
• Files nothing used. About 100 pre-7.0 planning and migration documents,
  the Go CLI (it inspected folders 7.0 removed), one-off migration scripts, a
  duplicate release workflow and other leftovers. The records of 7.0 and 7.1
  are kept, and git history keeps the rest.

Upgrading from 7.0

• If you installed from a checkout, pull and re-run npm run setup.
• Codex: the ~/.codex/hooks.json that 7.0 wrote has a $comment key, so
  Codex rejects the whole file. Setup will not overwrite a hooks file that
  differs from what it writes, so if that file holds only this package's
  hooks, delete it before re-running setup; if you added hooks of your own,
  rename its $comment key to description instead.
• Node 22 or later is required (Node 20 reached end of life on 30 April 2026).
• If you merged ~/.claude/a11y-hooks.json into your Claude Code settings by
  hand, remove those entries and use the plugin or claude --plugin-dir.
• Gemini CLI: if you merged ~/.gemini/a11y-hooks.json into
  ~/.gemini/settings.json, replace its AfterAgent mark entry with the new
  AfterTool entry for activate_skill (re-run npm run setup and merge
  again), or install the extension instead.

Thank you

Fixes and guidance from @w9fyi,
@AdamMagued,
@chrisnestrud and
@Orinks are in this release, including new Qt
Widgets guidance for desktop audits and a check for flex and grid rows that
split a phrase or glue words together.

Full changelog

See the 7.1.0 entry in CHANGELOG.md, and
the 7.1 standards audit for how the
work was checked and what is left to do.