Guide: Test for accessibility with scanning

This guide focuses on running scans in the platform. In this guide, you’ll learn:

• What is accessibility testing?
  • Types of accessibility testing
  • How to run your first scan and check the results
• What’s next?

What is accessibility testing?

Digital accessibility testing checks digital assets, for example websites, for issues that could impact people with disabilities, similar to how QA analysts test software for bugs.  

Types of accessibility testing

	Manual evaluations: Conducted by real people, including users with disabilities, who can perform comprehensive evaluations and find issues that affect real users. Design evaluations: Conducted by Level Access designers. This design-centric service, by designers for designers, finds accessibility issues rooted in the design of digital assets.
	Scanning: Conducted by computer automation. It’s significantly faster and easier to execute than manual testing, but it can’t test for all possible issues.  Monitoring: Set monitoring on your digital asset to track the accessibility health and trends over time. Monitoring schedules regular automated scans at the frequency of your choice. Note: This guide focuses on running scans in the platform.

How to run a scan and check your results

To get started, let’s run a quick scan on a single webpage.

1. Navigate to the workspace level. 
2. Under Workspace, select Digital assets. 
3. Select the digital asset you'd like to scan.
4. Under Automated tests, choose Scans.

5. Select Run scan. The Run scan side panel is displayed.  Here, you can configure the Basic and Advanced scan settings.

   

6. On the Basic tab, enter a URL in the Single webpage URL field. Alternatively, click Select page, searh for it, an select it, and then click the Select page button. 

Note: Select a page that represents the unique state to be scanned at this point in the automated flow. Add a new page if there isn't an existing page that represents that state. The page you choose to scan must be publicly available online and from your list of available domains. 

7. Select View available domains to reveal them. To scan pages with login details, you’ll need to run an advanced scan instead. 
8. From the Scan tag menu, select Default or a custom scan tag you created. Scan tags are labels for scans, and every scan needs one.  
   
9. Select Run scan. That’s it! It won’t take long to scan a single page, so wait for the results.
10. Check the scan results when the scan’s complete. 

Note: The Scan results page shows a summary of the scan data, including the accessibility health score and any accessibility rules that the webpage violated. Rules are associated with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) success criteria.

7. From the reported scan results, select a rule to check the individual findings. 

Note: We group individual accessibility issues under the rule they violate and call them findings. From the Rule description column, select a rule to view all the findings under that rule. To begin, select any failed rule with Open findings.
 

7. Check the details of a specific finding. Select a row in the findings table to check the details of that finding. A side panel opens to give you more information. Learn where the problem’s located and why it matters to someone with a disability.
   

Congratulations! You successfully ran a scan and checked the results.

What’s next?

Remediate with projects and tasks.