What actually happens when you scan your site.
No black box. Here's exactly what gets checked, how the score is built, and what you get at each step.
1. We crawl up to 30 public pages of your site
You give us a URL — nothing else. We visit your homepage and follow links to other pages on the same domain, the same way a visitor would. We don't log in, we don't touch anything behind a password, and we don't ask for access to any internal system. We stay off pages your own robots.txt tells us to avoid, and we space requests out so we don't put load on your hosting.
2. Visited pages get automated WCAG 2.1 AA checks
WCAG 2.1 AA is the specific standard named in the ADA Title II rule for public entities and the standard courts use in accessibility litigation. We check things like:
- Color contrast between text and its background
- Whether images have alternative text; a person must assess its meaning
- Whether forms have labels a screen reader can announce
- Some detectable keyboard barriers; full keyboard testing requires manual review
- Heading structure and page landmarks
3. We list linked documents and analyze a sample of PDFs and Word files
We collect up to 2,000 same-site links ending in .pdf, .doc or .docx from the pages we visit. We attempt to analyze the first 20 documents, checking PDFs for structure tags, a declared language, and text in the first three pages, and Word (.docx) files for heading styles, image alt text and a declared language. Older binary .doc files are inventoried but not analyzed. External document hosts, extensionless download links and documents beyond these limits may be missed. Files that exceed time or size limits are marked as not analyzed; tagging alone does not establish accessibility.
4. You get a score, then a choice
When pages and documents both have results, the score weights page checks at 70% and document tagging and structure at 30%. If only one has results, the score uses that component alone. Unanalyzed documents earn no passing credit; coverage is shown separately. The free result shows your score and the headline numbers. The full report — available after you leave your email — breaks every finding down in plain English, ranked by what to fix first, in a format you can hand to a board or a developer.
What this isn't
Taggora runs an automated screening against WCAG 2.1 rules. It flags likely issues quickly, but it doesn't replace a manual review and it isn't a certification of compliance — no automated tool can promise that.
An automated scan typically catches a meaningful share of WCAG issues, but not everything — things like whether alt text is actually meaningful, or whether a complex table reads in a sensible order, need a person to check. We'll tell you that plainly instead of selling you a number that implies more than it means.