Are there any automated ways to assess a web product against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)? This should really be part of the CI/CD process.
There's a Firefox/Chrome extension called Axe that's pretty good. We use at my company it to make our products accessible and it helped us tremendously.
The engine behind that add-on, Axe core, can be called from JS and there are some open source tools around to integrate it in your CI. I would say Axe is kind of the gold standard at this time when it comes to automated accessibility testing. Not because it catches the highest number of issues, but if it flags something you can be pretty sure it's a real issue and not a false positive.
Yes, there are a lot of tools. None are great and are mostly for compliance.
Products like Siteimprove are targeted at Enterprise (e.g. demos with sales weasels, unpublished pricing, etc). They mostly suck but check an auditing and compliance box.
