Following our release of axe-core 4.0 and the upcoming release of axe DevTools 4.0, we’ve made some changes to our other open-source packages. This post will detail the important changes and provide some insight into the reasons we made them.
Possibly the biggest change we’re making is migrating all open-source axe-core integrations to new locations. All previous packages will soon be deprecated, and the replacement packages have a new namespace: axe-core. There were a few reasons for this change. With the upcoming release of axe DevTools 4.0, we decided to rename our open source packages to have more consistent and meaningful package names and prevent confusion between open source and enterprise offerings.
We are also going to sync the version numbers of all of these packages with their axe-core version. This change was made much easier by migrating all of the packages to new repositories and starting all of their version numbers off at 4.0 to match the latest version of axe-core. Here’s a breakdown of all our new axe-core packages, and which original packages they replace:
NPM packages
Java Packages
| Old Package | New Package |
| com.deque:axe-selenium-java | com.deque.html.axe-core:selenium |
Ruby Packages
The axe-matcher package in Ruby has been split up into five separate packages, each integrating with a different testing framework.
If you’re a current user of axe-core open-source packages, you don’t have to worry about anything changing right now. Even though original packages will be deprecated, we’re making sure they will continue to be updated for bug fixes and security for at least the next year. This means you won’t have to worry about migrating right away, and can make the jump when you’re ready.
Besides the locations moving and package names changing, there is one other big update to axe-core 4.0 packages. This change adds new rule customization options via the brand new axe-core standards object. This object allows for customization of how axe-core interprets ARIA role, attributes, and use. The axe-core standards object works with ARIA attributes and roles, DPUB roles, HTML elements, and CSS colors to customize the way axe tests for elements with these properties.