Reporting a number of accessibility issues raised by axe-core on quarto blogs

Start with the quarto-accessibility-reprex example and inspect the axe-core warnings on its rendered site. Compare the generated output with accessibility-fixes.html and the changes enabled at _quarto.yml line 17; done means the reported accessibility warnings are addressed without breaking the blog pages and posts.

I have:

• searched the issue tracker for similar issues
• installed the latest version of Quarto CLI
• formatted my issue following the Bug Reports guide

Bug description

This issue is to report a number of accessibility warnings generate by axe-core on quarto websites, especially postings pages and blog posts. Tagging @cscheid since we had some back and forth about this on bsky.

A small self-contained example is available at: https://github.com/alexpghayes/quarto-accessibility-reprex

The axe-core warnings can be viewed at https://alexpghayes.github.io/quarto-accessibility-reprex/

I came across these warnings/issues while working to make my personal blog (https://github.com/alexpghayes/quarto-blog/) more accessible. Since I had a little understanding of what's happening in the background, I asked Gemini and Claude to resolve the accessibility issues for me. They produced the file: https://github.com/alexpghayes/quarto-accessibility-reprex/blob/main/accessibility-fixes.html. I include this file not as a bug fix or solution suggestion but merely as additional documentation. Uncommenting https://github.com/alexpghayes/quarto-accessibility-reprex/blob/main/_quarto.yml#L17 to enable the fixes resolves many, but not all, of the accessibility issues in the included reprex.

Steps to reproduce

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Actual behavior

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Expected behavior

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Your environment

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Quarto check output

Quarto 1.9.37
[✓] Checking environment information...
      Quarto cache location: /home/alex/.cache/quarto
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.8.3: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.87.0: OK
      Deno version 2.4.5: OK
      Typst version 0.14.2: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.9.37
      Path: /opt/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: (not installed)
      Chromium: (not installed)
      Chrome Headless Shell: (not installed)
      VeraPDF: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: Installation From Path
      Path: /usr/local/texlive/2025/bin/x86_64-linux
      Version: 2025

[✓] Checking Chrome Headless....................OK
      Using: Chrome found on system
      Path: /usr/bin/google-chrome
      Source: PATH

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.5.3
      Path: /opt/R/4.5.3/lib/R
      LibPaths:
        - /home/alex/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.5
        - /opt/R/4.5.3/lib/R/library
      knitr: 1.51
      rmarkdown: 2.31

[✓] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.10.13 (Conda)
      Path: /home/alex/anaconda3/bin/python
      Jupyter: 5.5.0
      Kernels: python3, sklearn0.24, lottery

[✓] Checking Jupyter engine render....OK

[✓] Checking Julia installation...