Is pa11y still maintained?

[audunolsen]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm currently debugging some puppeteer issues in our project, and traced the versions of puppeteer through our transitive dependencies and saw that this lib is quite far behind. Its last publish was well over a year ago.

So this is just me inquiring about the status of the project — and also, if not maintained, recommendations for alternatives?

Kind regards :)

[hollsk]

Hey @audunolsen - this is a perfectly fine place to ask, and thanks for using Pa11y!

We are unfortunately quite a bit behind, yes: basically just comes down to time pressure and having a big backlog of updates to make. The good news is that we're starting to tackle this backlog now, and are hoping to be done by mid-November.

So: we are actively working on it right now and you'll start seeing some updates very soon (days/weeks, not months/years!), though we do acknowledge that we've fallen behind and I understand this is off-putting for users 😅 We're hoping that this big burst of work over the next month will get us into a better place for more regular maintenance.

@danyalaytekin has kindly offered to update this issue once we've got the dependencies (including Puppeteer) updated.

[casey-riley]

Alrighty then, I just stopped by to mention the npm WARN; deprecated puppeteer@9.1.1 < 19.4.0 being no longer supported.

But now, I'm sure you know.

I'd actually never used Pa11y before, but just found out about it, through npx-awesome, which I was using... to build a website for ADHD, and autistic adults... so this is right up my alley, and it sounded really exciting, but then was quite a disappointment.

Anyway, i'll follow the project, and lmk if there's any... "dead simple"! way that I could help (quite new to developing things), and mostly just deal with web stuff html, css, and json... writing js still scares me but I'm learning

[danyalaytekin]

Hi @casey-riley and @audunolsen, thanks for writing and it's great to have you with us. @hollsk's reply has hopefully been reassuring.

Here's some evidence of our activity over the last week, if it'll raise confidence further. I'll ping you both here as @hollsk mentioned once pa11y@7.0.0 has shipped (it'll contain the first item in the list below). A similar update to pa11y-ci won't be far behind, which should help if you're using that package as well.

1. Update dependencies to resolve Ubuntu issues #664
   This one upgrades Puppeteer (thanks @aarongoldenthal) so it'll hopefully be a big step on the way to assuaging the concerns you've described.
2. End support for Node.js < 18 across projects org#17
   This issue is tracking our upgrades to Node.js support for each project.
3. And some work around the margins of Pa11y, while I've been learning the landscape:
   1. Update Node.js support to 18-20 from 12-16, dependencies, documentation, some practices pa11y-webservice-client-node#19
   2. Update Node.js requirements, ESLint, ruleset names; drop Make pa11y-lint-config#4
   3. Fix GitHub Actions build pa11y.github.io#105

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it sounded really exciting, but then was quite a disappointment

@audunolsen (oops, sorry Audun!) @casey-riley Is it just the outdated Puppeteer dependency that you're finding disappointing?

lmk if there's any way that I could help

Thanks for the offer. We do have two labels, status: good starter issue and status: help wanted, and I'm not sure how consistent we've been in labelling issues with these (I'm pretty new myself!), but I'll try to remember to label an issue with one of them myself from here if I think it could be a good candidate. Or you can just ping me here, or make a new issue and tag me in there, if you've already spotted something you think could be improved and weren't sure how to get started or whether it was actually an issue.

[casey-riley]

Is it just the outdated Puppeteer dependency that you're finding disappointing?

Yeah, that's all, the project itself seems really cool, and I was already playing with "new toys", npx, dix/ node in general, so I got overly excited, only for it to not work 😄

[hollsk]

Ha, oh no! We were so close!

Another easy way to help out the project for new contributors is what you're already doing here, @casey-riley - following the documentation and telling us where you find problems (or raising PRs to fix them directly), even if it's just stuff like dead links or spelling mistakes. The documentation is the first thing anyone looks at, so if it's got problems, then we all have.

Pa11y Dashboard is our HTML project, and there may be issues in there that you think you might be able to tackle. It's quite old, so it still uses jquery and an outdated version of Bootstrap, but it's just built with templated HTML that all lives in the view directory. Good luck if you give anything a try!

[casey-riley]

Alright. Basic web stuff is much more approachable, so I gave it a quick look, and yeah, I think there are some things I might be able to help with!

That said, I've got some work to finish up on my site first, and I'm not sure exactly how long it'll take, though, I'll be back when finished. For now, I'll mark this unread, and set some reminders. :) Hopefully, I'll be able to get back here in a week or 2.