I’ve just published a new tool: PBIR A11y CLI. It’s a command-line version of PBIX A11y, built to check Power BI accessibility while you’re building a report rather than after it’s finished.
PBIX A11y has always worked the same way: you finish a report, run it through the checker, and see what needs fixing before you ship it. That’s still useful, but it puts accessibility at the end of the process, as a review step rather than part of how the report gets built in the first place.
PBIR A11y CLI moves that check earlier. It reads a Power BI project folder directly, the same PBIP/PBIR format the file lives in on disk, and runs the same rules PBIX A11y already uses: contrast, alt text, tab order, target size, page and visual titles. The difference is where it sits in the workflow. It’s a terminal command, so you or an AI coding agent editing the report JSON can run it while the report is still being built, and catch an issue the moment it’s introduced rather than at the end.
The idea came from a tool called pbir.tools, a CLI built so AI coding agents like Claude Code and Copilot could edit Power BI reports directly. I’d already been wondering how to bring PBIX A11y into that kind of workflow, and seeing that tool made the shape of the answer obvious: build the same checks as a CLI, so an agent editing a report gets accessibility checked automatically instead of needing to be told to run an audit separately.
One decision I want to be upfront about is the license. PBIR A11y CLI is released under PolyForm Noncommercial, not something like MIT. That means anyone can use it, read it, modify it, and build on it for free, including other developers, students, and organisations. What it doesn’t allow is someone taking the code and selling it, or bundling it into a paid product without permission. Accessibility tooling should stay free for the people who need it, and I didn’t want to publish something open only to watch someone else monetise it later.
The repository is public now, and I’d genuinely welcome anyone working with Power BI trying it out and telling me what’s missing.
Check it at GitHub PBIR A11y CLI
