Guide: Track your progress with a monitor

Who can use this feature?

• Organization administrators and workspace administrators.
• Available for all packages.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• About accessibility monitoring.
• Ways to monitor your digital properties.
• How to set up a monitor.

What’s monitoring?

Monitoring or monitors are recurring scans that start without prompting. They capture accessibility trends over time and can alert your team if a score drops too low.

Why it's important 

Whether you update a website regularly or only once in a while, each change is an opportunity to introduce accessibility issues. Monitoring ensures you’re checking for new findings regularly. It also helps you catch and fix issues early on and learn what kind of changes might impact accessibility.

How to use monitoring

Get the most impactful data by monitoring more than one environment. Monitor your production environment to understand the current experience and where you can improve. Monitor staging and development to identify accessibility issues before going live.

Remember, you can only have one monitor per website. To add a new website, request support.

Ways to use monitoring

	Identify issues in releases. If you do regular releases, schedule monitors to align with them. That way you can quickly identify any accessibility issues that might have been introduced without manually running scans.
	Track remediation progress. If you set up a monitor, you'll see a graph of your accessibility scores on the Overview and on the Monitoring page. As you remediate findings, monitoring will passively collect data and graph your progress.
	Get alerted to changes. Monitoring alerts can help you keep tabs on your website. Get an email notification if your score drops below a certain percentage and use that alert to start taking action.

How to set up an accessibility monitor

Monitoring quick setup allows you to set up monitoring with little effort using predefined monitoring settings. All you need to do is select the recurrence and start on date. If you want a more customized monitoring scan, use Advanced setup.

The table below describes the predefined monitoring settings.

Follow these steps to set up a monitor using quick setup. To complete this task, you need at least one website in your workspace.

1. From the main menu, go to Monitoring. Make sure you’ve got the right website selected before setting up a monitor. From this page, set up monitoring and find scan results and analytics. Once your monitor is set up, the Monitoring page will show analytics like the findings trend and accessibility health score trend.
   
2. Select Monitoring settings. Monitoring settings should lead to quick monitoring setup page by default. If Monitoring settings leads to advanced setup, your digital property may not be compatible with quick setup.
3. Fill out the required fields. Customize to your preferences or use the example parameters below.
   • Choose an occurrence of weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. This dictates how often your monitoring scan will run. If you’re not sure what to choose, go with bi-weekly. You can update the occurrence any time.
     
   • Select the start on date. This is the date of your first monitoring scan. 
     
4. Select Save and monitor your results over time.

Your monitor will now run at regular intervals and report the results back to the platform. You can view your progress over time from the Overview and Monitoring page.

The results of your first monitoring scan may take some time to generate. Check back later to review your results!

Summary

Congratulations! You successfully set up an accessibility monitor. Your monitor will continue to collect data and show the impact of your remediation efforts over time. 

What's next?

If you want to continue learning about the platform, browse our help center documentation, check out our Navigate the Portfolio and Navigate the Overview articles, and see our additional resources.