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CompliaScan

Getting Started with CompliaScan

Everything you need to go from a fresh account to continuous accessibility monitoring: add your first site, read your first report, set up alerts, and then put your results to work with statements, ACR reports, badges, and a CI gate.

Your First 10 Minutes

If you have not run a scan yet, start on the homepage: paste any URL and you get a score and severity breakdown in about 30 seconds, no signup required. Entering your email unlocks the detailed fix guidance for that scan, and creating an account keeps your scan history. Once you are on a paid plan, the dashboard shows a getting-started checklist — these are the same four steps.

  1. 1

    Add your first site

    Open the My Sites tab and add your domain. A monitored site is the unit everything else attaches to: scheduled scans, alerts, the embeddable badge, statements, and ACR reports all hang off a site.

  2. 2

    Enable monitoring

    Toggle monitoring on for the site in the My Sites tab. CompliaScan then re-scans the site automatically on your plan's schedule (monthly, weekly, or daily — see the monitoring section below), so regressions get caught instead of accumulating silently.

  3. 3

    Set an alert email

    Expand the site in the My Sites tab to configure alerts: choose which conditions notify you and, optionally, a dedicated notification address. Without alerts, monitoring still runs — you just have to remember to check the dashboard.

  4. 4

    Generate your first report

    Run a scan and open it from the Recent Scans tab. The next section explains how to read the score, severity levels, and issue details.

Depending on your plan, the checklist also suggests next steps covered later in this guide: generating an ACR report (Statements & ACR, Pro and above), embedding your score badge, and wiring the API into CI (API Keys tab, Pro and above).

Understanding Your Scan Report

The score

Every scan produces a 0–100 score based on the number and severity of detected WCAG issues. For multi-page site scans, the site score is the average of the individual page scores, so one bad page pulls the site down proportionally rather than zeroing it out. Treat the score as a trend line: the direction over time matters more than any single number.

Severity levels

Issues are grouped into four severities: Critical (blocks access for some users — e.g. missing form labels, keyboard traps), Serious (major barriers like insufficient color contrast), Moderate, and Minor. Fix critical and serious issues first, and prioritize anything that repeats across pages — shared components collapse many findings into one fix.

Issue detail

Each issue shows the failing WCAG rule, the affected HTML element, and how to fix it. On paid plans every issue is shown in full detail; the Free plan details the top issues found. Starter and above also include AI-generated fix instructions tailored to your markup.

What automated scanning covers — and what it doesn't

Automated tools reliably detect the machine-testable subset of WCAG criteria — roughly 30 to 40 percent: missing alt text, contrast failures, unlabeled form fields, incorrect ARIA, empty links, undeclared page language, and similar. Criteria like captions, focus order, and consistent navigation need human judgment. A clean scan is a strong signal, not a compliance guarantee — pair it with the manual steps in our accessibility audit guide.

Monitoring & Alerts

Websites regress: every deploy, CMS edit, or third-party script update can reintroduce issues. Monitoring re-scans each site on a schedule set by your plan, and alerts email you when something changes. Each plan also includes a monthly allowance of on-demand site scans you can trigger manually between scheduled runs.

PlanMonitored sitesScan schedulePages per scanOn-demand scans/mo
Free—One-off scans only1—
Starter5Monthly1505
Pro15Weekly50025
Business50Daily1,00060
Agency75Daily1,500100
Agency Pro200Daily1,500250

Three alert conditions can trigger an email, configured per site in the My Sites tab:

  • Score below threshold — the site's score falls below a threshold you choose.
  • New critical issues — a scheduled scan finds critical issues that weren't there before.
  • Score drop — the score decreases from the previous scan.

Alerts go to your account email by default, or to a notification address you set per site. Note that disabling all three alerts for a site also turns its monitoring off. For the reasoning behind continuous monitoring, see Why Accessibility Needs Continuous Monitoring.

Statements & ACR

The Statements & ACR tab turns your scan data into two documents other people ask you for.

Accessibility statement (Starter and above)

A public page declaring your conformance target, known limitations, and a feedback contact. Link the statement to a monitored site and CompliaScan auto-populates the conformance data — score, issue summary, known limitations — from your latest completed scan. The European Accessibility Act, Section 508, and many industry rules expect a published statement. No account, or still on Free? The free accessibility statement generator produces a standalone version.

ACR / VPAT report (Pro and above)

An Accessibility Conformance Report on the ITI VPAT 2.5 template — the document procurement teams and government RFPs ask for. The flow:

  1. Create a report in the VPAT sub-tab: product name, URL, WCAG version (2.0/2.1/2.2) and conformance target (A/AA/AAA), optionally linking a monitored site.
  2. If a site is linked, CompliaScan drafts the report from your latest scan, mapping each WCAG criterion to Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support, or Not Applicable based on real violations.
  3. Review the Not Evaluatedrows — criteria automation cannot test (captions, focus order, consistent navigation, and others). Complete those with manual testing before sending the report to a buyer; an honest “Partially Supports” reads better than a suspicious wall of “Supports.”
  4. Export as PDF or HTML, or publish it to a shareable public link. Use Regenerate after each remediation cycle to keep it current.

For the procurement context — who asks for ACRs and why — see the Section 508 guide and the VPAT feature overview.

Badge & Sharing

Every scan report and every monitored site includes an embeddable score badge — one line of HTML you paste into your own site's footer. The badge image is served live by CompliaScan: a site badge updates automatically whenever a scheduled re-scan changes your score, while a badge from an individual scan stays fixed to that scan's result. The badge links back to your report, so visitors can verify the score for themselves.

You'll find the copy-paste snippet on the scan report page (“Show off your score”) and under each site in the My Sites tab. It signals your accessibility commitment publicly — which also means keep monitoring on, so the score it shows stays one you're happy to display.

API & CI Gate

On Pro, Business, Agency, and Agency Pro, the REST API lets you script everything the dashboard does. Create a key in the API Keys tab and send it as a Bearer token:

# Start a scan
curl -X POST https://compliascan.com/api/v1/scan \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer cs_YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}'

# Poll for the result, then check the quality gate
curl "https://compliascan.com/api/v1/scan/SCAN_ID/gate?threshold=70&maxCritical=0" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer cs_YOUR_API_KEY"

The gate endpoint is built for CI/CD: it returns a pass or fail verdict against a minimum score (threshold) and optional caps on critical and serious issues (maxCritical, maxSerious), so your pipeline can block a deploy that would ship an accessibility regression. The API also covers fetching full scan results and fix guidance, managing sites and alerts, scan history, statements, VPAT reports, data export, and usage. Full endpoint reference, error codes, and more examples live in the API documentation.

Where to Get Help

  • Guides library

    The guides index covers WCAG 2.2, ADA compliance, Section 508, audits, and monitoring in depth — useful when a scan finding sends you down a standards rabbit hole.

  • Contact and accessibility feedback

    Reach us through the contact page. We hold ourselves to the same standard we scan for — our own accessibility statement documents CompliaScan's conformance status and how to report issues with our site.

  • AI-readable docs

    If you use an AI assistant, point it at compliascan.com/llms.txt — a curated, machine-readable map of the product, tools, and guides that helps assistants answer CompliaScan questions accurately.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a credit card for the free scan?
No. You can scan any URL from the homepage without an account or payment details. Entering your email unlocks the detailed fix guidance for that scan, and a free account gives you 5 scans per month at 1 page per scan. A credit card is only needed when you upgrade to a paid plan.
How many sites can I monitor?
Monitored sites are a paid-plan feature: Starter includes 5 sites (monthly scans), Pro 15 (weekly), Business 50 (daily), Agency 75 (daily), and Agency Pro 200 (daily). The Free plan supports one-off scans but no monitored sites. See pricing for the full comparison.
What's the difference between a statement and an ACR?
An accessibility statement is a public page declaring your commitment, conformance target, known limitations, and a feedback channel — laws like the European Accessibility Act expect one. An ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report, commonly called a VPAT) is a criterion-by-criterion conformance report on the ITI VPAT template that procurement teams request during purchasing. CompliaScan generates statements on Starter and above, and ACR/VPAT reports on Pro and above.
Does a clean scan mean I'm ADA compliant?
No. Automated scanning reliably detects the machine-testable subset of WCAG criteria — roughly 30 to 40 percent. A clean scan means no detectable issues in that subset; it is not a compliance guarantee. Full conformance also requires manual testing (keyboard-only passes, screen reader review) that no automated tool can replace.
Which plans include API access?
The REST API and CI quality gate are available on Pro, Business, Agency, and Agency Pro. Create keys from the API Keys tab in the dashboard and authenticate with a Bearer token — see the API documentation.

Related Resources

Why Accessibility Needs Continuous Monitoring

Why one-time audits fail, what causes regressions, and how monitoring catches issues early.

How to Conduct a Web Accessibility Audit

The manual testing steps that complete what automated scanning starts.

Section 508 Compliance: The Complete Guide

The law behind ACRs and VPATs, and how federal procurement uses them.

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