Guide: Test for accessibility with scanning – Level Access Help Center

In this guide, you’ll learn:

About accessibility testing
How to run your first scan and check the results

What is accessibility testing?

Digital accessibility testing is all about testing a website to find problems that might affect people with disabilities, similar to how a quality assurance analyst might test a piece of software for bugs.

Types of accessibility testing

	Manual testing: conducted by real people, including users with disabilities, who can perform comprehensive evaluations and find issues that affect real users.
	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.

Using both types of testing together is necessary to create a robust accessibility testing practice.

Since scanning is fast and any user can do it, 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.

Go to Websites/apps.
Select the website you'd like to scan.
Choose Scans.
Select Run scan. From this pop-up, any member of your team can test for accessibility issues using the built-in testing tools.
On the Basic tab, enter a URL in the Single webpage URL field. The page you choose to scan must be publicly available online and from your list of available domains (select View available domains to reveal them). To scan pages with login details, you’ll need to run an advanced scan instead.
Choose the Default scan tag. Scan tags are labels for scans, and every scan needs one. For now, use the placeholder tag called Default. As you run more scans, create custom scan tags to organize them.
Select Run scan. That’s it! It won’t take long to scan a single page, so wait for the results.
Check the scan results. When the scan’s complete, open the results. 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.
Select a rule from the Report table to check the individual findings. On the platform, we group individual accessibility issues under the rule they violate and call them findings. Select a rule description to see all the findings under that rule. To start, select any failed rule with open findings.
Check the details of a specific finding. Select a row in the findings table to check the details of that finding. A sidebar will open to give you more information like where the problem’s located and why it matters to someone with a disability.