What is A11ystack?

These days, most of Whitespace's new agency choose a headless CMS. Since the headless CMS is used solely for content management, you need additional technologies to actually be able to build and launch the website. Do you want to go headless without losing the features of a traditional CMS? If you run a large website or Intranet, this would typically require considerable development work. To top it off, you would end up with a bespoke solution with significant maintenance costs.

A11ystack changes things. It is a modular site generator that is bundled with

• an API that federates the APIs of underlying services and content repositories.
• a component library with the components required to build websites, self service portals and Intranets for thousands of employees.
• a personalization engine.
• SAML authentication for end users.
• built in integration with Azure AD or LDAP.
• search.
• progressive web app features, including offline support.

A11ystack builds on popular and robust open source technologies like Gatsby, Storybook and GraphQL. A11ystack will be open sourced, under the AGPL 3.0 license.

As the name implies, accessibility is front and center during the development of A11ystack. The components in the A11ystack component library are WCAG 2.1 compliant on the AA level.

The A11ystack product has been developed in website- and Intranet projects for Whitespace's agency clients. The first A11ystack client launched their website in June 2020.