Establishing Your Baseline: Running Your First Accessibility Scan
The first step in achieving and maintaining compliance with Adacertify is to establish a clear baseline of your website’s current accessibility status.
Running Your First Accessibility Scan is a simple, non-technical process that provides an instant, detailed snapshot of where your website stands against essential standards like the ADA and WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
This initial scan is crucial because it transforms vague uncertainty into clear, actionable data.
A Simple, Three-Step Process to Audit
Adacertify is designed for user simplicity, requiring no coding experience to initiate a comprehensive audit. The process is quick and intuitive:
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Log in to your Adacertify dashboard: Your central hub for all compliance activities.
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Enter your website URL in the scan field: Simply tell the system which site you want to check.
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Click “Run Accessibility Audit”: The platform takes over from here.
Within a matter of seconds, you will receive a detailed report outlining every accessibility issue found on your website.
This speed allows you to move immediately from setup to action. After fixing issues, you can re-run the scan anytime to instantly confirm the improvements have been correctly implemented.
What the Scan Evaluates and Why it Matters
The initial scan checks for a wide array of common and critical accessibility issues that affect users with disabilities and carry legal risk. Key areas of evaluation include:
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Image Accessibility: Identifying missing or incorrect alt text on images.
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Visual Design: Detecting low color contrast that affects visibility for users with low vision.
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Navigation: Checking for issues that impede navigation for screen reader users and keyboard-only users.
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Interactive Elements: Finding form and button accessibility problems, such as unlabeled form fields.
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Content Structure: Validating the correct use of semantic structure (headings, labels, ARIA attributes, etc.).
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This first scan is vital because it provides your crucial baseline—a foundation from which all subsequent remediation and monitoring will operate.
It tells you exactly which issues require immediate attention, allowing you to prioritize fixes and understand precisely how close your site is to achieving full ADA and WCAG compliance.