Reading your report

The most important page in this guide. Click any page in Pages to open its report.

The four result buckets#

Do not ignore Incomplete. It does not mean "fine". It means the scanner hit something it cannot evaluate — text over a background image, a control whose purpose depends on context. These are often real problems that automation cannot confirm.

You may also see Partial coverage near the score. That flags that some content — typically third-party iframes — could not be scanned, and the report is for what Zylyn could reach.

Severity: what to fix first#

Four levels, and they are a genuine priority order:

Fix Critical and Serious first. They are both the largest real-world barriers and the findings that appear in legal complaints.

WCAG failures versus best practice#

This trips people up, so it's worth being precise.

Each finding is tagged either with a WCAG level and criterion (e.g. WCAG AA · 1.4.3) or with WCAG BEST PRACTICE.

• A tagged criterion = a failure against the actual standard. This is what conformance and legal exposure are judged on.
• BEST PRACTICE = a recommendation that improves accessibility but is not a WCAG failure. Examples: "Document should have one main landmark", "All page content should be contained by landmarks", "The skip-link target should exist and be focusable".

Both are worth fixing. But if someone asks "are we WCAG conformant?", only the tagged criteria answer that question — and a page can look alarming while having only one or two real failures. When reporting to a client or a board, count the WCAG-tagged findings, not the raw total.

Per-finding detail#

Expand any finding and you get:

• Plain-English explanation of the rule, plus a Learn more link to the full documentation
• Affected elements, each with its CSS selector and the actual markup from your page
• The precise problem. Contrast findings include the measured ratio, both colours, font size and weight, and the required ratio — for example:

That is enough for a developer to fix without guessing. Hand them the selector and the numbers.

Where a finding affects many elements, the report shows the first five and tells you the total.

What automated scanning cannot find#

Be clear-eyed about this, because it determines how much assurance a clean report gives you.

Automated tools reliably cover roughly 20–40% of WCAG success criteria. They are excellent at mechanical checks — missing alt text, contrast ratios, unlabelled form fields, heading structure. They cannot assess:

• Whether alt text is meaningful (alt="image123" passes; it helps nobody)
• Whether keyboard focus order makes logical sense
• Whether a screen reader announces a custom control usefully
• Whether an error message actually tells the user how to recover
• Whether your content is understandable

A 100/100 score does not mean your site is accessible. It means the machine-checkable part is clean. For conformance you can defend, you need manual testing with assistive technology — use Request remediation help on any report.

Actions available on a report#