What we will not sell you
A monitoring product can be made to sound like a guarantee. This page is the list of things we refuse to say, and why saying them would cost you the argument in front of an auditor.
The honest boundary
Measure, map, diff, archive
- Scan every page in a portfolio on a schedule and map each finding to an EN 301 549 clause and a WCAG success criterion.
- Fingerprint findings so a fix that returns after a deploy is named as a regression rather than counted as new work.
- Record manual criteria — keyboard, focus order, screen-reader flow — with the tester named and the evidence attached.
- Seal the whole run into a dated archive with a hash manifest, and keep it downloadable for 24 months.
Certificates, overlays, silent repairs
- We never certify conformance. No badge, no seal, no conformance claim anywhere in the product, the PDF or the mail.
- We do not ship an overlay widget. Accessibility practitioners and disability organisations agree they do not create conformance, and their presence reads badly to an auditor.
- We do not rewrite the customer’s site. Findings carry a repair suggestion; applying it stays a human decision in your own codebase.
- We do not present an automated score as a full assessment. Every score carries the coverage sentence next to it.
The words the product is not allowed to use
These substitutions are enforced in the interface copy, the generated PDFs and the sales material. The left column costs you credibility; the right column survives scrutiny. The table is built from the same constant list the code validates against.
| Never written | Written instead |
|---|---|
| EN 301 549 mapped findings | |
| Evidence pack for your own declaration | |
| 0 automated violations detected | |
| Continuous monitoring and audit trail |
The clause is in the terms, not in the footnotes
It appears verbatim in the terms of service, and the same sentence sits on the cover of every generated report. Nobody signs a contract with us believing they bought a certificate.
Terms of service, article 4.2
The Vendor does not certify conformance with Directive (EU) 2019/882 or EN 301 549. Automated testing detects a subset of accessibility barriers. The Customer remains the responsible economic operator for its own accessibility statement and conformance declaration.
Automated testing covers a subset of accessibility barriers. Manual verification is required for a complete assessment.
Attributions
- axe-core
- Rule engine used under MPL-2.0, unmodified and wrapped. The trademark is not used in our product name or marketing.
- EN 301 549 v3.2.1
- Published free by ETSI. We reference clause numbers and write our own summaries; clause text is never copied.
- WCAG 2.2
- Success criteria titles are used as short references. The full text stays with the W3C.
How the crawler behaves on your client’s server
The scanner identifies itself, respects the rules and stays slow enough to be invisible. A scan that ignores robots.txt is weaker evidence, even on a site you own.
| Setting | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| User agent | ConformaBot/1.0 | Published at /bot with contact details, so an ops team can identify the traffic in minutes. |
| Concurrency | 2 requests | Never more than two simultaneous requests to the same host, whatever the plan. |
| Delay | 250 ms | Minimum gap between requests, raised automatically when the host slows down. |
| robots.txt | Always honoured | Disallowed paths are skipped and recorded as skipped in the evidence pack. |
Scan a client site and read the wording for yourself
One domain, no card, five pages. You will see the clause numbers, the coverage note, and exactly how careful the language is before you decide anything.
The scan obeys robots.txt and identifies itself as ConformaBot.