Set Up Automated Scan Integration

To set up automated scan integration on an accessibility platform, you connect your web property to the platform’s scanner, configure which pages or sections to evaluate, schedule the recurring frequency, and route results into the platform’s issue tracking. Most platforms complete this setup through a guided workflow that takes under an hour for a standard website. The configuration determines how often pages are evaluated, which environments are covered, and how findings appear inside the dashboard for review.

Connect the Site to the Platform

The first step is establishing how the scanner reaches your pages. Public pages are typically added by submitting a root URL or uploading a sitemap. The platform then crawls and indexes the pages it should evaluate against WCAG success criteria.

Authenticated pages, such as account dashboards or members-only content, require a different approach. These usually rely on a browser extension that runs the scanner inside an active session, or on credentials supplied to a headless browser configured for the scan.

Define the Scan Scope

Scope decides which pages get evaluated and how deeply the crawler follows links. Some teams scan every URL on the site. Others narrow the list to high-traffic templates, conversion pages, and recently updated content.

For larger properties, grouping pages by template or section makes results easier to interpret. A product page template repeated across thousands of URLs produces the same patterns of issues, so scanning a representative sample often delivers the same insight as scanning everything.

Set the Recurring Schedule

Recurring scans are what separate a one-time check from ongoing monitoring. The right frequency depends on how often content changes:

• Daily scans suit sites with frequent publishing, user-generated content, or active development cycles.
• Weekly scans work well for marketing sites and ecommerce stores with regular but predictable updates.
• Monthly scans fit static sites or properties between formal evaluations.
• Custom hooks can run scans after deployments or content publishing events through API calls.

Configure How Results Appear

Once the scanner runs, the platform parses results and populates the issue tracker. Configuration choices here include severity thresholds, assignment rules for routing issues to specific team members, and whether duplicate findings across pages should be grouped under a single tracked item.

Notification settings determine who receives alerts when new issues appear or when scan runs complete. Most platforms support email digests, in-app notifications, and webhook outputs for connecting to project management tools.

Account for What Scans Do Not Cover

Automated scans evaluate HTML, CSS, and ARIA attributes against programmatic rules. They identify approximately 25% of accessibility issues, primarily those that can be detected through code inspection alone. The remaining 75% requires manual evaluation by an accessibility professional using screen reader testing, keyboard testing, and visual inspection.

Scan integration is best understood as continuous coverage of the portion of issues that can be detected programmatically, paired with periodic manual evaluations for full conformance assessment. Treating scan results as the complete picture leads to oversights that scans were never designed to catch.

Validate the Integration

After configuration, conduct an initial scan and review the output before relying on automation. Confirm that pages were reached, that authenticated areas were evaluated where applicable, and that results populate the dashboard with the expected metadata. Adjust scope or schedule based on what the first run shows about page coverage and issue volume.

Once verified, the integration runs in the background and feeds the platform’s tracking, reporting, and progress views without further intervention.