Most government agencies learn about accessibility problems the hard way: a complaint letter, a lawsuit filing, or a DOJ investigation. By that point, the issue has existed for months — sometimes years — affecting thousands of residents who simply couldn't use the service.
HelloCivic Scanner flips this model. Instead of waiting for reports, it continuously monitors your web properties, identifies WCAG violations as they appear, and gives your team the context needed to fix them before they become legal problems.
The Problem with Point-in-Time Audits
Traditional accessibility audits — whether manual or automated — capture a snapshot. An auditor reviews your site on Tuesday, delivers a report on Friday, and by Monday your content team has published three new pages that were never tested.
Government websites are dynamic. Content changes daily:
- New meeting agendas get posted
- PDF documents are uploaded
- Forms get modified
- Third-party widgets update
- CMS templates receive patches
A single audit, no matter how thorough, becomes stale within days. Continuous monitoring is the only way to maintain confidence in your compliance posture.
How the Scanner Works
HelloCivic Scanner uses a real headless browser — not a simplified HTML parser — to crawl and analyze your pages exactly as a user's browser would render them.
1. Intelligent Crawling
When you add a site to the scanner, it begins by discovering every reachable page from your sitemap and internal links. The crawler respects robots.txt, follows pagination, and handles JavaScript-rendered content (SPAs, dynamic menus, lazy-loaded sections).
You can configure crawl scope: full site, specific sections, or individual URLs. For large sites with thousands of pages, the crawler handles depth and breadth efficiently — scanning pages in parallel while respecting rate limits to avoid impacting your servers.
2. Axe-Core Analysis Engine
Every page is analyzed using axe-core, the industry-standard open-source accessibility testing library maintained by Deque Systems. Axe-core tests against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 success criteria with near-zero false positives.
The analysis covers:
- Structure: Heading hierarchy, landmark regions, list markup
- Images: Alt text presence, decorative image handling, complex image descriptions
- Color: Contrast ratios for text, UI components, and graphical elements
- Forms: Labels, error identification, required field indicators
- Navigation: Skip links, focus order, keyboard operability
- ARIA: Proper role usage, state management, label associations
3. Issue Classification and Prioritization
Raw scan results are organized into actionable issues, each tagged with:
- WCAG criterion: The exact success criterion violated (e.g., 1.4.3 Contrast)
- Severity: Critical, Serious, Moderate, or Minor
- Impact: How many pages and users are affected
- Element context: The specific HTML element, its selector, and a screenshot
- Remediation guidance: What to fix and how
Issues are de-duplicated intelligently. If the same contrast failure appears on 500 pages because it's in a shared header component, it shows as one issue affecting 500 pages — not 500 separate issues cluttering your queue.
4. Scheduled and On-Demand Scanning
You control the scanning cadence:
- Scheduled scans: Run automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Ideal for catching regressions from content updates.
- On-demand scans: Trigger manually when you've deployed fixes and want to verify. Also useful before a planned content launch.
- URL-specific scans: Target individual pages after remediation without re-scanning the entire site.
5. Trend Tracking and Reporting
Every scan result is stored historically. The analytics dashboard shows:
- Issue count over time: Are you making progress or regressing?
- Score trends: Your overall WCAG conformance score after each scan
- Category breakdown: Which WCAG principles have the most violations?
- Resolved vs. new: How many issues were fixed since last scan, and how many new ones appeared?
This historical data is invaluable for demonstrating compliance progress to leadership, auditors, or legal teams.
Beyond Detection: VPATs and Compliance Badges
VPAT Generation
The scanner's data feeds directly into HelloCivic's VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) generator. Instead of spending weeks manually documenting conformance levels for each WCAG criterion, the system generates a draft VPAT from your actual scan data — pre-populated with supports, partially supports, and does not support assessments based on real test results.
Your accessibility team reviews and refines the generated VPAT rather than building one from scratch. This turns a multi-week documentation exercise into a few hours of review.
Public Compliance Badge
For agencies that want to demonstrate transparency, the scanner powers an embeddable compliance badge. This badge displays your current conformance score and links to a public conformance statement — showing residents that you take accessibility seriously and actively monitor it.
What the Scanner Catches (and What It Can't)
Automated testing reliably catches approximately 57% of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. This includes:
Reliably detected:
- Missing alt text
- Insufficient color contrast
- Missing form labels
- Heading hierarchy violations
- Missing page titles
- Keyboard traps
- Missing ARIA labels
- Link purpose issues
Requires manual testing:
- Logical reading order
- Meaningful link text (context-dependent)
- Audio description adequacy
- Cognitive load assessment
- Consistent identification across pages (partial automation)
HelloCivic Scanner covers the automated portion comprehensively. For the criteria that require human judgment, the platform includes a manual checks workflow where team members can systematically review and document their assessments.
Getting Started
Adding a site takes under two minutes. Enter your URL, configure the crawl scope, and let the first scan run. Within minutes you'll have a complete picture of your accessibility posture — every violation catalogued, prioritized, and ready for your team to act on.
No more waiting for complaints. No more wondering if last week's content update broke something. Just continuous visibility into exactly where you stand.